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THE WRITINGS OF 
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

IN THIRTEEN VOLUMES 
. VOLUME VIII. 



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PAGES FROM AN OLD 
VOLUME OF LIFE 

^ Collection of Csfiapg 

1857-1881 

BY 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 



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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

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Copyright, 1863, 1871, 1883, and 18i>l, 
By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

Copyright, 1899, 
By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

All rights reserved. 



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The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. 



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CONTENTS. 

♦ 

PAGB 

I. Bread and the Newspaper 1 

11. My Hunt after "The Captain" ... 16 

III. The Inevitable Trial 78 

IV. The Physiology op Walking .... 121 
V. The Seasons 132 

VI. The Human Body and its Management . . 186 

VII. Cinders from the Ashes 239 

VIII. Mechanism in Thought and Morals . . . 260 

IX. The Physiology of Versification . . .315 

X. Crime and Automatism 322 

XL Jonathan Edwards .361 

XII. The Pulpit and the Pew ..... 402 



PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 



These pages are varied in character and may be 
expected to interest different classes of readers, if they 
are fortunate enough to interest any. 

The first three papers carry the reader back to the 
time of the war. " Bread and the Newspaper " may 
recall to many middle-aged and elderly persons the 
feelings excited by the early events of the war, when 
" Bread and the Newspaper " was the new version of 
Partem et Circenses. 

" My Hunt after the Captain " carried me to many 
localities rendered memorable by the events which had 
recently occurred in them or their immediate neigh- 
borhood, among others, to the field of Antietam, 
where I found myself only three or four days after the 
great battle. The reader who has the patience to 
follow me in my hunt after the Captain may be glad 
to know that he survived all wounds, two of which 
looked very dangerous, and is now a justice of the 
Supreme Court of Massachusetts. 

If a writer may claim the privilege of commending 
any one of his productions to the reader's attention, I 
venture to ask that favor for the paper called " The 
Seasons." There are many facts brought together, 
some of which are not to be found elsewhere, which 
those who are curious about the climatic conditions in 
which they live may find instruction as well as enter- 



VI PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION. 

tainment. The writer, at least, found great satisfac- 
tion in the observations of some of his friends who are 
keener observers than himself, and in various printed 
papers not familiarly known to the public. I may 
especially mention Professor Lovering's articles in 
the "American Almanac," and Mr. Higginson's very 
pleasant articles in the "Atlantic Monthly." 

Dr. Hill, late President of Harvard College, fa- 
vored me with some observations, for which the 
reader as well as myself owes him a grateful acknow- 
ledgment. 

"Cinders from the Ashes " is a bit of autobio- 
graphy which a few kindly disposed readers may find 
not without interest. 

"Mechanism in Thought and Morals" was deliv- 
ered as the Annual Address before the "Phi Beta 
Kappa" Society. It has been printed separately and 
has found many readers both here and in England. 
This, with the three last Essays, "Crime and Auto- 
matism," "Jonathan Edwards," and "The Pulpit and 
the Pew," are for the more thoughtful class of read- 
ers, who will find many opinions in them which are 
open to discussion, and not a few which must expect 

to be disputed. 

O. W. H. 

Bbvekly Farms, Mass., August 3, 1891. 



PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 



I. 

BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER. 

(September, 1861.) 

This is the new version of tlie Panem et Circenses 
of the Roman populace. It is our ultimatum, as that 
was theirs. They must have something to eat, and the 
circus-shows to look at. We must have something to 
eat, and the papers to read. 

Everything else we can give up. If we are rich, we 
can lay down our carriages, stay away from Newport 
or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip to Europe sine die. 
If we live in a small way, there are at least new 
dresses and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we 
can dispense with. If the young Zouave of the family 
looks smart in his new miiform, its respectable head is 
content, though he himself grow seedy as a caraway- 
umbel late in the season. He will cheerfully calm the 
perturbed nap of his old beaver by patient brushing in 
place of buying a new one, if only the Lieutenant's 
jaunty cap is what it should be. We all take a pride 
in sharing the epidemic economy of the time. Only 
bread and the newspaper we must have, whatever else 
we do without. 

How this war is simplifying our mode of being! 
We live on our emotions, as the sick man is said in 
the common speech to be nourished by his fever. Our 



2 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ordinary mental food has become distasteful, and what 
would have been intellectual luxuries at other times, 
are now absolutely repulsive. 

All this change in our manner of existence implies 
that we have experienced some very profound impres- 
sion, which will sooner or later betray itself in perma- 
nent effects on the minds and bodies of many among 
us. We cannot forget Corvisart's observation of the 
frequency with which diseases of the heart w^ere no- 
ticed as the consequence of the terrible emotions pro- 
duced by the scenes of the great French Revolution. 
Laennec tells the story of a convent, of which he was 
the medical director, where all the nuns were subjected 
to the severest penances and schooled in the most pain- 
ful doctrines. They all became consumptive soon after 
their entrance, so that, in the course of his ten years' 
attendance, all the inmates died out two or three 
times, and were replaced by new ones. He does not 
hesitate to attribute the disease from which they suf- 
fered to those depressing moral influences to which 
they were subjected. 

So far we have noticed little more than disturbances 
of the nervous system as a consequence of the war ex- 
citement in non-combatants. Take the first trifling 
example which comes to our recollection. A sad dis- 
aster to the Federal army was told the other day in 
the presence of two gentlemen and a lady. Both the 
gentlemen complained of a sudden feeling at the epi- 
gastrium^ or, less learnedly, the pit of the stomach, 
changed color, and confessed to a slight tremor about 
the knees. The lady had a " grande rivolution^^ as 
French patients say, — went home, and kept her bed 
for the rest of the day. Perhaps the reader may smile 
at the mention of such trivial indispositions, but in 



BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER. 3 

more sensitive natures death itself follows in some 
cases from no more serious cause. An old gentleman 
fell senseless in fatal apoplexy, on hearing of Napo- 
leon's return from Elba. One of our early friends, 
who recently died of the same complaint, was thought 
to have had his attack mainly in consequence of the 
excitements of the time. 

We all know what the war fei^er is in our young 
men, — what a devouring passion it becomes in those 
whom it assails. Patriotism is the fire of it, no doubt, 
but this is fed with fuel of all sorts. The love of ad- 
venture, the contagion of example, the fear of losing 
the chance of participating in the great events of the 
time, the desire of personal distinction, all help to 
produce those singular transformations which we often 
witness, turning the most peaceful of our youth into 
the most ardent of our soldiers. But something of the 
same fever in a different form reaches a good many 
non-combatants, who have no thought of losing a drop 
of precious blood belonging to themselves or their 
families. Some of the symptoms we shall mention are 
almost universal ; they are as plain in the people we 
meet everywhere as the marks of an influenza, when 
that is prevailing. 

The first is a nervous restlessness of a very peculiar 
character. Men cannot think, or write, or attend to 
their ordinary business. They stroll up and down the 
streets, or saunter out upon the public places. We 
confessed to an illustrious author that we laid down 
the volume of his work which we were reading when 
the war broke out. It was as interesting as a ro- 
mance, but the romance of the past grew pale before 
the red light of the terrible present. Meeting the 
same author not long afterwards, he confessed that he 



4 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

had laid down Ms pen at the same time that we had 
closed his book. He could not write about the six- 
teenth century any more than we could read about it, 
while the nineteenth was in the very agony and bloody 
sweat of its great sacrifice. 

Another most eminent scholar told us in all sim> 
plicity that he had fallen into such a state that he 
would read the same telegraphic dispatches over and 
over again in different papers, as if they were new, 
until he felt as if he were an idiot. Who did not do 
just the same thing, and does not often do it still, now 
that the first flush of the fever is over ? Another per- 
son always goes through the side streets on his way for 
the noon extra^ — he is so afraid somebody will meet 
him and tell the news he wishes to read^ first on the 
bulletin-board, and then in the ^great capitals and 
leaded type of the newspaper. 

When any startling piece of war-news comes, it keeps 
repeating itself in our minds in spite of all we can do. 
The same trains of thought go tramping round in cir- 
cle through the brain, like the supernumeraries that 
make up the grand army of a stage-show. Now, if a 
thought goes round through the brain a thousand 
times in a day, it will have worn as deep a track as 
one which has passed through it once a week for 
twenty years. This accounts for the ages we seem to 
have lived since the twelfth of April last, and, to state 
it more generally, for that ex post facto operation of 
a great calamity, or any very powerful impression, 
which we once illustrated by the image of a stain 
spreading backwards from the leaf of life open before 
us through all those which we have already turned. 

Blessed are those who can sleep quietly in times like 
these ! Yet, not wholly blessed, either ; for what ia 



BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER. 5 

more painful than the awaking from peaceful uncon- 
sciousness to a sense that there is something wrong, — ■ 
we cannot at first think what, — and then groping our 
way about through the twilight of our thoughts until 
we come full upon the misery, which, like some evil 
bird, seemed to have flown away, but which sits wait- 
ing for us on its perch by our pillow in the gray of 
the morning? 

The converse of this is perhaps still more painful. 
Many have the feeling in their waking hours that the 
trouble they are aching with is, after all, only a 
dream, — if they will rub their eyes briskly enough 
and shake themselves, they will awake out of it, and 
find all their supposed grief is unreal. This attempt 
to cajole ourselves out of an ugly fact always reminds 
us of those unhappy flies who have been indulging in 
the dangerous sweets of the paper prepared for their 
especial use. 

Watch one of them. He does not feel quite well, 
— at least, he suspects himself of indisposition. 
Nothing serious, — let us just rub our fore-feet to- 
gether, as the enormous creature who provides for us 
rubs his hands, and all will be right. He rubs them 
with that peculiar twisting movement of his, and 
pauses for the effect. No ! all is not quite right yet. 
Ah I it is our head that is not set on just as it ought 
to be. Let us settle that where it should be, and then 
we shall certainly be in good trim again. So he pulls 
his head about as an old lady adjusts her cap, and 
passes his fore-paw over it like a kitten washing her- 
self. — Poor fellow ! It is not a fancy, but a fact, that 
he has to deal with. If he could read the letters at 
the head of the sheet, he would see they were Fly- 
Paper, — So with us, when, in our waking misery, we 



6 PAGES FKOM AN OLD A'OLUME OF LIFE. 

try to think we dream ! Perhaps very young persons 
may not understand this ; as we grow older, our 
waking and dreaming life run more and more into 
each other. 

Another symptom of our excited condition is seen 
in the breaking up of old habits. The newspaper is 
as imperious as a Russian Ukase ; it will be had, and 
it will be read. To this all else must give place. If 
we must go out at unusual hours to get it, we shall go, 
in spite of after-dinner nap or evening somnolence. 
If it finds us in company, it will not stand on cere- 
mony, but cuts short the compliment and the story by 
the divine right of its telegraphic dispatches. 

War is a very old story, but it is a new one to this 
generation of Americans. Our own nearest relation 
in the ascending line remembers the Revolution well. 
How should she forget it ? Did she not lose her doll, 
which was left behind, when she was carried out of 
Boston, about that time growing uncomfortable by 
reason of cannon-balls dropping in from the neighbor- 
ing heights at all hours, — in token of which see the 
tower of Brattle Street Church at this very day ? War 
in her memory means '76. As for the brush of 1812, 
" we did not think much about that " ; and everybody 
knows that the Mexican business did not concern us 
much, except in its political relations. No ! war is a 
new thing to all of us who are not in the last quarter 
of their century. We are learning many strange 
matters from our fresh experience. And besides, 
there are new conditions of existence which make 
war as it is with us very different from war as it has 
been. 

The first and obvious difference consists in the fact 



BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER. T 

that the whole nation is now penetrated by the rami- 
fications of a network of iron nerves which flash sen- 
sation and volition backward and forward to and from 
towns and provinces as if they were organs and limbs 
of a single living body. The second is the vast sys- 
tem of iron muscles which, as it were, move the limbs 
of the mighty organism one upon another. What 
was the railroad-force which put the Sixth Regiment 
in Baltimore on the 19th of April but a contraction 
and extension of the arm of Massachusetts with a 
clenched fist full of bayonets at the end of it ? 

This perpetual intercommunication, joined to the 
power of instantaneous action, keeps us always alive 
with excitement. It is not a breathless courier who 
comes back with the report from an army we have lost 
sight of for a month, nor a single bulletin which tells 
us all we are to know for a week of some great en- 
gagement, but almost hourly paragraphs, laden with 
truth or falsehood as the case may be, making us rest- 
less always for the last fact or rumor they are telling. 
And so of the movements of our armies. To-night 
the stout lumbermen of Maine are encamped under 
their own fragrant pines. In a score or two of hours 
they are among the tobacco-fields and the slave-pens 
of Virginia. The war passion burned like scattered 
coals of fire in the households of Revolutionary times ; 
now it rushes all through the land like a flame over 
the prairie. And this instant diffusion of every fact 
and feeling produces another singular effect in the 
equalizing and steadying of public opinion. We may 
not be able to see a month ahead of us ; but as to 
what has passed a week afterwards it is as thoroughly 
talked out and judged as it would have been in a whole 
season before our national nervous system was organ- 
ized. 



8 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

** As the wild tempest wakes the slumbering sea, 
Thou only teachest all that man can be ! " 

We indulged in the above apostrophe to War in a 
Phi Beta Kappa poem of long ago, which we liked 
better before we read Mr. Cutler's beautiful prolonged 
.lyric delivered at the recent anniversary of that So- 
ciety. 

Oftentimes, in paroxysms of peace and good -will 
towards all mankind, we have felt twinges of con- 
science about the passage, — especially when one of 
our orators showed us that a ship of war costs as 
much to build and keep as a college, and that every 
port-hole we could stop would give us a new professor. 
Now we begin to think that there was some meaning 
in our poor couplet. War has taught us, as nothing 
else could, what we can be and are. It has exalted 
our manhood and our womanhood, and driven us all 
back upon our substantial human qualities, for a long 
time more or less kept out of sight by the spirit of 
commerce, the love of art, science, or literature, or 
other qualities not belonging to all of us as men and 
women. 

It is at this very moment doing more to melt away 
the petty social distinctions which keep generous souls 
apart from each other, than the preaching of the Be- 
loved Disciple himself would do. We are finding out 
that not only " patriotism is eloquence," but that hero- 
ism is gentility. All ranks are wonderfully equalized 
under the fire of a masked battery. The plain arti- 
san or the rough fireman, who faces the lead and iron 
like a man, is the truest representative we can show of 
the heroes of Crecy and Agincourt. And if one of 
our fine gentlemen puts off his straw-colored kids and 
stands by the other, shoulder to shoulder, or leads him 



BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER. 9 

on to the attack, lie is as honorable in our eyes and in 
theirs as if he were ill-dressed and his hands were 
soiled with labor. 

Even our poor " Brahmins," — whom a critic in 
ground-glass spectacles (the same who grasps his sta- 
tistics by the blade and strikes at his supposed antago- 
nist with the handle) oddly confounds with the " bloated 
aristocracy," whereas they are very commonly pallid, 
undervitalized, shy, sensitive creatures, whose only 
birthright is an aptitude for learning, — even these 
poor New England Brahmins of ours, suhvirates of an 
organizable base as they often are, count as fidl men, 
if their courage is big enough for the uniform which 
hangs so loosely about their slender figures. 

A young man was drowned not very long ago in the 
river running under our windows. A few days after- 
wards a field-piece was dragged to the water's edge, 
and fired many times over the river. We asked a by- 
stander, who looked like a fisherman, what that was 
for. It was to " break the gall," he said, and so bring 
the drowned person to the surface. A strange phys- 
iological fancy and a very odd non sequitur; but 
that is not our present point. A good many extraor- 
dinary objects do really come to the surface when the 
great guns of war shake the waters, as when they 
roared over Charleston harbor. 

Treason came up, hideous, fit only to be huddled 
into its dishonorable grave. But the wrecks of pre- 
cious virtues, which had been covered with the waves 
of prosperity, came up also. And all sorts of unex- 
pected and unheard-of things, which had lain unseen 
during our national life of fourscore years, came up 
and are coming up daily, shaken from their bed by the 
concussions of the artillery bellowing around us. 



10 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

It is a shame to own it, but there were persons other- 
wise respectable not unwilling to say that they believed 
the old valor of Revolutionary times had died out from 
among us. They talked about our own Northern peo- 
ple as the English in the last centuries used to talk 
about the French, — Goldsmith's old soldier, it maybe 
remembered, called one Englishman good for five of 
them. As Napoleon spoke of the English, again, as a 
nation of shopkeepers, so these persons affected to con- 
sider the multitude of their countrymen as unwarlike 
artisans, — forgetting that Paul Revere taught himself 
the value of liberty in working upon gold, and Na- 
thaniel Greene fitted himself to shape armies in the 
labor of forging iron. 

These persons have learned better now. The brav- 
ery of our free w^orking-people was overlaid, but not 
smothered; sunken, but not drowned. The hands 
which had been busy conquering the elements had 
only to change their weapons and their adversaries, 
and they were as ready to conquer the masses of living 
force opposed to them as they had been to build towns, 
to dam rivers, to hunt whales, to harvest ice, to hammer 
brute matter into every shape civilization can ask for. 

Another great fact came to the surface, and is com- 
ing up every day in new shapes, — that we are one 
people. It is easy to say that a man is a man in 
Maine or Minnesota, but not so easy to feel it, all 
through our bones and marrow. The camp is depro- 
vincializing us very fast. Brave Winthrop, marching 
with the city elegants^ seems to have been a little 
startled to find how wonderfully human were the hard- 
handed men of the Eighth Massachusetts. It takes all 
the nonsense out of everybody, or ought to do it, to see 
how fairly the real manhood of a country is distributed 



BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER. 11 

over its surface. And then, just as we are beginning 
to think our own soil has a monopoly of heroes as well 
as of cotton, up turns a regiment of gallant Irishmen, 
like the Sixty-ninth, to show us that continental pro- 
vincialism is as bad as that of Coos County, New 
Hampshire, or of Broadway, New York. 

Here, too, side by side in the same great camp, are 
half a dozen chaplains, representing half a dozen 
modes of religious belief. When the masked battery 
opens, does the " Baptist " Lieutenant believe in his 
heart that God takes better care of him than of his 
" Congregationalist " Colonel ? Does any man really 
suppose, that, of a score of noble young fellows who 
have just laid down their lives for their country, the 
Homoousians are received to the mansions of bliss, 
and the Homoiousians translated from the battle-field 
to the abodes of everlasting woe ? War not only 
teaches what man can be, but it teaches also what he 
must not be. He must not be a bigot and a fool in 
the presence of that day of judgment proclaimed by the 
trumpet which calls to battle, and where a man should 
have but two thoughts : to do his duty, and trust his 
Maker. Let our brave dead come back from the fields 
where they have fallen for law and liberty, and if you 
will follow them to their graves, you will find out what 
the Broad Church means ; the narrow church is spar- 
ing of its exclusive formulae over the coffins wrapped 
in the flag which the fallen heroes had defended ! Very 
little comparatively do we hear at such times of the 
dogmas on which men differ ; very much of the faith 
and trust in which all sincere Christians can agree. 
It is a noble lesson, and nothing less noisy than the 
voice of cannon can teach it so that it shall be heard 
over all the angry cries of theological disputants. 



12 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

Now, too, we have a chance to test the sagacity oi 
our friends, and to get at their principles of judgment. 
Perhaps most of us will agree that our faith in domes- 
tic prophets has been diminished by the experience of 
the last six months. We had the notable predictions 
attributed to the Secretary of State, which so unpleas- 
antly refused to fulfil themselves. We were infested 
at one time with a set of ominous-looking seers, who 
shook their heads and muttered obscurely abouly some 
mighty preparations that were making to substitute the 
rule of the minority for that of the majority. Organ- 
izations were darkly hinted at ; some thought our ar- 
mories would be seized; and there are not wanting 
ancient women in the neighboring University town 
who consider that the country was saved by the in- 
trepid band of students who stood guard, night after 
night, over the G. R. cannon and the pile of balls in 
the Cambridge Arsenal. 

As a general rule, it is safe to say that the best 
prophecies are those which the sages remember after 
the event prophesied of has come to pass, and remind 
us that they have made long ago. Those who are rash 
enough to predict publicly beforehand commonly give 
us what they hope, or what they fear, or some conclu- 
sion from an abstraction of their own, or some guess 
founded on private information not half so good as 
what everybody gets who reads the papers, — never 
by any possibility a word that we can depend on, sim- 
ply because there are cobwebs of contingency between 
every to-day and to-morrow that no field-glass can pen- 
etrate when fifty of them lie woven one over another. 
Prophesy as much as you like, but always hedge. Say 
that you think the rebels are weaker than is commonly 
supposed, but, on the other hand, that they may prove 



BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER. 13 

to be even stronger than is anticipated. Say what you 
like, — only don't be too peremptory and dogmatic ; 
we hnoio that wiser men than you have been notori- 
ously deceived in their predictions in this very matter^ 

Ibis et redibis nunquam in bello peribis. 

Let that be your model ; and remember, on peril of 
your reputation as a prophet, not to put a stop before 
or after the nunquam. 

There are two or three facts connected with time^ 
besides that already referred to, which strike us very 
forcibly in their relation to the great events passing 
around us. We spoke of the long period seeming to 
have elapsed since this war began. The buds were 
then swelling which held the leaves that are still 
green. It seems as old as Time himself. We cannot 
fail to observe how the mind brings together the scenes 
of to-day and those of the old Revolution. We shut 
up eighty years into each other like the joints of a 
pocket-telescope. When the young men from Middle- 
sex dropped in Baltimore the other day, it seemed to 
bring Lexington and the other Nineteenth of April 
close to us. War has always been the mint in which 
the world's history has been coined, and now every 
day* or week or month has a new medal for us. It was 
Warren that the first impression bore in the last great 
coinage ; if it is Ellsworth now, the new face hardly 
seems fresher than the old. All battle-fields are alike 
in their main features. The young fellows who fell in 
our earlier struggle seemed like old men to us until 
within these few months ; now we remember they 
were like these fiery youth we are cheering as they go 
to the fight ; it seems as if the grass of our bloody 
hillside was crimsoned but yesterday, and the cannon- 



14 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ball imbedded in the cliurcb-tower would feel warm, if 
we laid our band upon it. 

Nay, in tbis our quickened life we feel tbat all the 
battles from earliest time to our own day, where Kight 
and Wrong have grappled, are but one great battle, 
varied with brief pauses or hasty bivouacs upon the 
field of conflict. The issues seem to vary, but it is al- 
ways a right against a claim, and, however the strug- 
gle of the hour may go, a movement onward of the 
campaign, which uses defeat as well as victory to serve 
its mighty ends. The very implements of our warfare 
change less than we think. Our bullets and cannon- 
balls have lengthened into bolts like those which whis= 
tied out of old arbalests. Our soldiers fight with 
weapons, such as are pictured on the walls of Theban 
tombs, wearing a newly invented head-gear as old as 
the days of the Pyramids. 

Whatever miseries this war brings upon us, it is 
making us wiser, and, we trust, better. Wiser, for 
we are learning our weakness, our narrowness, our 
selfishness, our ignorance, in lessons of sorrow and 
shame. Better, because all that is noble in men and 
women is demanded by the time, and our people are 
rising to the standard the time calls for. For this is 
the question the hour is putting to each of us : Are 
you ready, if need be, to sacrifice all that you have 
and hope for in this world, that the generations to fol- 
low you may inherit a whole country whose natural 
condition shall be peace, and not a broken province 
which must live under the perpetual threat, if not in 
the constant presence, of war and all that war brings 
with it ? If we are all ready for this sacrifice, battles 
may be lost, but the campaign and its grand object 
must be won. 



BREAD AND THE NEWSPAPER. 15 

Heaven is very kind in its way of putting questions 
to mortals. We are not abruptly asked to give up all 
that we most care for, in view of the momentous issues 
before us. Perhaps we shall never be asked to give 
up all, but we have already been called upon to part 
with much that is dear to us, and should be ready to 
yield the rest as it is called for. The time may come 
when even the cheap public print shall be a burden 
our means cannot support, and we can only listen 
in the square that was once the market-place to the 
voices of those who proclaim defeat or victory. Then 
there will be only our daily food left. When we have 
nothing to read and nothing to eat, it will be a favor- 
able moment to offer a compromise. At present we 
have all that nature absolutely demands, — we can 
live on bread and the newspaper. 



II. 

MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 

In the dead of the night which closed upon the 
bloody field of Antietam, my household was startled 
from its slumbers by the loud summons of a tele- 
graphic messenger. The air had been heavy all day 
with rumors of battle, and thousands and tens of thou- 
sands had walked the streets with throbbing hearts, 
in dread anticipation of the tidings any hour might 
bring. 

We rose hastily, and presently the messenger was 
admitted. I took the envelope from his hand, opened 
it, and read : — 

Hagerstown 17th 

To H- 

Capt H— wounded shot through the neck thought 

not mortal at Keedysville 

William G Leduc 

Through the neck, — no bullet left in wound. Wind- 
pipe, food-pipe, carotid, jugular, half a dozen smaller, 
but still formidable vessels, a great braid of nerves, 
each as big as a lamp-wick, spinal cord, — ought to 
kill at once, if at all. Thought not mortal, or not 
thought mortal, — which was it ? The first ; that is 
better than the second would be. — " Keedysville, a 
post-office, Washington Co., Maryland." Leduc ? Le- 
duc ? Don't remember that name. — The boy is wait- 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 17 



*r 



ing for his money. A dollar and thirteen cents. Has 
nobody got thirteen cents ? Don't keep that boy wait- 
ing, — how do we know what messages he has got to 
carry ? 

The boy had another message to carry. It was to 
the father of Lieutenant-Colonel Wilder Dwight, in- 
forming him that his son was grievously wounded in 
the same battle, and was lying at Boonsborough, a 
town a few miles this side of Keedysville. This I 
learned the next morning from the civil and attentive 
officials at the Central Telegraph Office. 

Calling upon this gentleman, I found that he meant 
to leave in the quarter past two o'clock train, taking 
with him Dr. George H. Gay, an accomplished and 
energetic surgeon, equal to any difficult question or 
pressing emergency. I agreed to accompany them, 
and we met in the cars. I felt myself peculiarly for- 
tunate in having companions whose society would be a 
pleasure, whose feelings would harmonize with my own, 
and whose assistance I might, in case of need, be glad 
to claim. 

It is of the journey which we began together, and 
which I finished apart, that I mean to give my " At- 
lantic " readers an account. They must let me tell my 
story in my own way, speaking of many little matters 
that interested or amused me, and which a certain 
leisurely class of elderly persons, who sit at their fire- 
sides and never travel, will, I hope, follow with a kind 
of interest. For, besides the main object of my ex- 
cursion, I could not help being excited by the inci- 
dental sights and occurrences of a trip which to a com- 
mercial traveller or a newspaper-reporter would seem 
quite commonplace and undeserving of record. There 
are periods in which all places and people seem to be 



18 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

in a conspiracy to impress us with their individuality, 
in which every ordinary locality seems to assume a 
special significance and to claim a particular notice, 
in which every person we meet is either an old acquaint- 
ance or a character ; days in which the strangest coin- 
cidences are continually happening, so that they get 
to be the rule, and not the exception. Some might 
naturally think that anxiety and the weariness of a 
prolonged search after a near relative would have pre- 
vented my taking any interest in or paying any regard 
to the little matters around me. Perhaps it had just 
the contrary effect, and acted like a diffused stimulus 
upon the attention. When all the faculties are wide- 
awake in pursuit of a single object, or fixed in the 
spasm of an absorbing emotion, they are oftentimes 
clairvoyant in a marvellous degree in respect to many 
collateral things, as Wordsworth has so forcibly illus- 
trated in his sonnet on the Boy of Windermere, and 
as Hawthorne has developed with such metaphysical 
accuracy in that chapter of his wondrous story where 
Hester walks forth to meet her punishment. 

Be that as it may, — though I set out with a full 
and heavy heart, though many times my blood chilled 
with what were perhaps needless and unwise fears, 
though I broke through all my habits without thinking 
about them, which is almost as hard in certain circum- 
stances as for one of our young fellows to leave his 
sweetheart and go into a Peninsular campaign, though 
I did not always know when I was hungry nor dis- 
cover that I was thirsting, though I had a worrying 
ache and inward tremor underlying all the outward 
play of the senses and the mind, yet it is the simple 
truth that I did look out of the car-windows with an 
eye for all that passed, that I did take cognizance of 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 19 

strange sights and singular people, that I did act much 
as persons act from the ordinary promptings of curios- 
ity, and from time to time even laugh very much as 
others do who are attacked with a convulsive sense of 
the ridiculous, the epilepsy of the diaphragm. 

By a mutual compact, we talked little in the carSo 
A communicative friend is the greatest nuisance to 
have at one's side during a railroad journey, especially 
if his conversation is stimulating and in itself agreeable, 
" A fast train and a ' slow ' neighbor," is my motto. 
Many times, when I have got upon the cars, expecting 
to be magnetized into an hour or two of blissful rev- 
erie, my thoughts shaken up by the vibrations into 
all sorts of new and pleasing patterns, arranging them- 
selves in curves and nodal points, like the grains of 
sand in Chladni's famous experiment, — fresh ideas 
coming up to the surface, as the kernels do when a 
measure of corn is jolted in a farmer's wagon, — all 
this without volition, the mechanical impulse alone 
keeping the thoughts in motion, as the mere act of 
carrying certain watches in the pocket keeps them 
wound up, — many times, I say, just as my brain was 
beginning to creep and hum with this delicious loco- 
motive intoxication, some dear detestable friend, cordial, 
intelligent, social, radiant, has come up and sat down 
by me and opened a conversation which has broken my 
day-dream, unharnessed the flying horses that were 
whirling along my fancies and hitched on the old weary 
omnibus-team of every-day associations, fatigued my 
hearing and attention, exhausted my voice, and milked 
the breasts of my thought dry during the hour when 
they should have been filling themselves full of fresh 
juices. My friends spared me this trial. 

So, then, I sat by the window and enjoyed the slight 



20 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

tipsiness produced by short, limited, rapid oscillations, 
which I take to be the exhilarating stage of that con- 
dition which reaches hopeless inebriety in what we 
know as sea-sickness. Where the horizon opened 
widely, it pleased me to watch the curious effect of the 
rapid movement of near objects contrasted with the 
slow motion of distant ones. Looking from a right- 
hand window, for instance, the fences close by glide 
swiftly backv/ard, or to the right, while the distant hills 
not only do not appear to move backward, but look by 
contrast with the fences near at hand as if they v/ere 
moving forward, or to the left ; and thus the whole 
landscape becomes a mighty wheel revolving about an 
imaginary axis somewhere in the middle-distance 

My companions proposed to stay at one of the best- 
known and longest-established of the New-York cara- 
vansaries, and I accompanied them. We were par- 
ticularly well lodged, and not uncivilly treated. The 
traveller who supposes that he is to repeat the melan- 
choly experience of Shenstone, and have to sigh over 
the reflection that he has found " his warmest welcome 
at an inn," has something to learn at the offices of the 
great city hotels. The unheralded guest who is hon- 
ored by mere indifference may think himself blessed 
with singular good-fortune. If the despot of the 
Patent- Annunciator is only mildly contemptuous in his 
manner, let the victim look upon it as a personal favor. 
The coldest welcome that a threadbare curate ever got 
at the door of a bishop's palace, the most icy reception 
that a country cousin ever received at the city mansion 
of a mushroom millionaire, is agreeably tepid, com- 
pared to that which the Rhadamanthus who dooms you 
to the more or less elevated circle of his inverted In- 
ferno vouchsafes, as you step up to enter your name on 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 21 

his dog's-eared register. I have less hesitation in un- 
burdening myself of this uncomfortable statement, as 
on this particular trip I met with more than one ex- 
ception to the rule. Officials become brutalized, I 
suppose, as a matter of course. One cannot expect an 
office clerk to embrace tenderly every stranger who 
comes in with a carpet-bag, or a telegraph operator to 
burst into tears over every unpleasant message he re- 
ceives for transmission. Still, humanity is not always 
totally extinguished in these persons. I discovered a 
youth in a telegraph office of the Continental Hotel, in 
Philadelphia, who was as pleasant in conversation, and 
as graciously responsive to inoffensive questions, as if 
I had been his childless opulent uncle and my will not 
made. 

On the road again the next morning, over the ferry, 
into the cars with sliding panels and fixed windows, so 
that in summer the whole side of the car may be made 
transparent. New Jersey is, to the apprehension of a 
traveller, a double-headed suburb rather than a State. 
Its dull red dust looks like the dried and powdered 
mud of a battle-field. Peach-trees' are common, and 
champagne-orchards. Canal-boats, drawn by mules, 
swim by, feeling their way along like blind men led by 
dogs. I had a mighty passion come over me to be the 
captain of one, — to glide back and forward upon a 
sea never roughened by storms, — to float where I 
could not sink, — to navigate where there is no ship- 
wreck, — to lie languidly on the deck and govern the 
huge craft by a word or the movement of a finger : 
there was something of railroad intoxication in the 
fancy : but who has not often envied a cobbler in 
his stall ? 

The boys cry the " N'-York HeddUr instead of 



22 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

" Herald " ; I remember that years ago in Philadel- 
phia ; we must be getting near the farther end of the 
dumb-bell suburb. A bridge has been swept away by 
a rise of the waters, so we must approach Philadel- 
phia by the river. Her physiognomy is not distin- 
guished ; ne% camus^ as a Frenchman would say ; no 
illustrious steeple, no imposing tower ; the water-edge 
of the town looking bedraggled, like the flounce of a 
vulgar rich woman's dress that trails on the sidewalk. 
The New Ironsides lies at one of the wharves, ele- 
phantine in bulk and color, her sides narrowing as 
they rise, like the walls of a hock-glass. 

I went straight to the house in Walnut Street 
where the Captain would be heard of, if anywhere in 
this region. His lieutenant-colonel was there, gravely 
wounded; his college-friend and comrade in arms, a 
son of the house, was there, injured in a similar way ; 
another soldier, brother of the last, was there, pros- 
trate with fever. A fourth bed was waiting ready for 
the Captain, but not one word had been heard of him, 
though inquiries had been made in the towns from 
and through which 'the father had brought his two sons 
and the lieutenant-colonel. And so my search is, like 
a " Ledger " story, to be continued. 

I rejoined my companions in time to take the noon- 
train for Baltimore. Our company was gaining in 
number as it moved onwards. We had found upon 
the train from New York a lovely, lonely lady, the 
wife of one of our most spirited Massachusetts offi- 
cers, the brave Colonel of the ^th Regiment, going 

to seek her wounded husband at Middletown, a place 
lying directly in our track. She was the light of our 
party while we were together on our pilgrimage, a 
fair, gracious woman, gentle, but courageous, 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 23 

" ful plesant and amiable of port, 

estatelich of manere, 

And to ben holden digne of reverence." 

On the road from Philadelpliia, I found in the same 
car with our party Dr. William Hunt of Philadelphia, 
who had most kindly and faithfully attended the Cap- 
tain, then the Lieutenant, after a wound received at 
Ball's Bluff, which came very near being mortal. He 
was going upon an errand of mercy to the wounded, 
and found he had in his memorandum-book the name 
of our lady's husband, the Colonel, who had been 
commended to his particular attention. 

Not long after leaving Philadelphia, we passed a soli- 
tary sentry keeping guard over a short railroad bridge. 
It was the first evidence that we were approaching the 
perilous borders, the marches where the North and the 
South mingle their angry hosts, where the extremes 
of our so-called civilization meet in conflict, and the 
fierce slave-driver of the Lower Mississippi stares into 
the stern eyes of the forest-feller from the banks of 
the Aroostook. All the way along, the bridges were 
guarded more or less strongly. In a vast country like 
ours, communications play a far more complex part 
than in Europe, where the whole territory available 
for strategic purposes is so comparatively limited. 
Belgium, for instance, has long been the bowling-alley 
where kings roll cannon-balls at each other's armies ; 
but here we are playing the game of live ninepins 
without any alley. 

We were obliged to stay in Baltimore over night, 
as we were too late for the train to Frederick. At 
the Eutaw House, where we found both comfort and 
courtesy, we met a number of friends, who beguiled 
the evening hours for us in the most agreeable man- 



24 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ner. We devoted some time to procuring surgical 
and other articles, such as might be useful to our 
friends, or to others, if our friends should not need 
them. In the morning, I found myself seated at the 
breakfast-table next to General Wool. It did not 
surprise me to find the General very far from expan- 
sive. With Fort McHenry on his shoulders and Bal- 
timore in his breeches-pocket, and the weight of a mil- 
itary department loading down his social safety-valves, 
I thought it a great deal for an officer in his trying 
position to select so very obliging and affable an aid 
as the gentleman who relieved him of the burden of 
attending to strangers. 

We left the Eutaw House, to take the cars for Fred- 
erick. As we stood waiting on the platform, a tele- 
graphic message was handed in silence to my companion. 
Sad news : the lifeless body of the son he was hasten- 
ing to see was even now on its way to him in Baltimore. 
It was no time for empty words of consolation : I 
knew what he had lost, and that now was not the time 
to intrude upon a grief borne as men bear it, felt as 
women feel it. 

Colonel Wilder Dwight was first made known to me 
as the friend of a beloved relative of my own, who 
was with him during a severe illness in Switzerland, 
and for whom while living, and for whose memory 
when dead, he retained the warmest affection. Since 
that the story of his noble deeds of daring, of his cap- 
ture and escape, and a brief visit home before he was 
able to rejoin his regiment, had made his name famil- 
iar to many among us, myself among the number. 
His memory has been honored by those who had the 
largest opportunity of knowing his rare promise, as a 
man of talents and energy of nature. His abounding 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 25 

vitality must have produced its impression on all who 
met him ; there was a still fire about him which any 
one could see would blaze up to melt all difficulties and 
recast obstacles into implements in the mould of an 
heroic will. These elements of his character many had 
the chance of knowing; but I shall always associate 
him with the memory of that pure and noble friend- 
ship which made me feel that I knew him before I 
looked upon his face, and added a personal tenderness 
to the sense of loss which I share with the whole com- 
munity. 

Here, then, I parted, sorrowfully, from the compan- 
ions with whom I set out on my journey. 

In one of the cars, at the same station, we met Gen- 
eral Shriver of Frederick, a most loyal Unionist, whose 
name is synonymous with a hearty welcome to all whom 
he can aid by his counsel and his hospitality. He took 
great pains to give us all the information we needed, 
and expressed the hope, which was afterwards fulfilled, 
to the great gratification of some of us, that we should 
meet again when he should return to his home. 

There was nothing worthy of special note in the trip 
to Frederick, except our passing a squad of Kebel 
prisoners, whom I missed seeing, as they flashed by, 
but who were said to be a most forlorn-looking crowd 
of scarecrows. Arrived at the Monocacy River, about 
three miles this side of Frederick, we came to a halt, 
for the railroad bridge had been blown up by the Reb- 
els, and its iron pillars and arches were lying in the 
bed of the river. The unfortunate wretch who fired 
the train was killed by the explosion, and lay buried 
hard by, his hands sticking out of the shallow grave 
into which he had been huddled. This was the story 
they told us, but whether true or not I must leave 



26 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

to the correspondents of "Notes and Queries" to 
settle. 

There was a great confusion of carriages and wag- 
ons at the stopping-place of the train, so that it was 
a long time before I could get anything that would 
carry us. At last I was lucky enough to light on a 
sturdy wagon, drawn by a pair of serviceable bays, and 
driven by James Gray den, with whom I was destined 
to have a somewhat continued acquaintance. We took 
up a little girl who had been in Baltimore during the 
late Rebel inroad. It made me think of the time when 
my own mother, at that time six years old, was hur- 
ried off from Boston, then occupied by the British sol- 
diers, to Newburyport, and heard the people saying 
that " the redcoats were coming, killing and murder- 
ing everybody as they went along." Frederick looked 
cheerful for a place that had so recently been in an 
enemy's hands. Here and there a house or shop was 
shut up, but the national colors were waving in all 
directions, and the general aspect was peaceful and 
contented. I saw no bullet-marks or other sign of the 
fighting which had gone on in the streets. The Colo- 
nel's lady was taken in charge by a daughter of that 
hospitable family to which we had been commended by 
its head, and I proceeded to inquire for wounded offi- 
cers at the various temporary hospitals. 

At the United States Hotel, where many were lying, 
I heard mention of an officer in an upper chamber, 
and, going there, found Lieutenant Abbott, of the 
Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteers, lying ill with 
what looked like typhoid fever. While there, who 
should come in but the almost ubiquitous Lieutenant 
Wilkins, of the same Twentieth, whom I had met re- 
peatedly before on errands of kindness or duty, and 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 27 

17I10 was just from tlie battle-ground. He was going 
to Boston in charge of the body of the lamented Dr. 
Revere, the Assistant Surgeon of the regiment, killed 
on the field. From his lips I learned something of the 
mishaps of the regiment. My Captain's wound he 
spoke of as less grave than at first thought ; but he 
mentioned incidentally having heard a story recently 
that he was hilled^ — a fiction, doubtless, — a mistake, 
— a palpable absurdity, — not to be remembered or 
made any account of. Oh no ! but what dull ache is 
this in that obscurely sensitive region, somewhere be- 
low the heart, where the nervous centre called the semi- 
lunar ganglion lies unconscious of itself until a great 
grief or a mastering anxiety reaches it through all the 
non-conductors which isolate it from ordinary impres- 
sions ? I talked awhile with Lieutenant Abbott, who 
lay prostrate, feeble, but soldier-like and uncomplain- 
ing, carefully waited upon by a most excellent lady, a 
captain's wife. New England born, loyal as the Liberty 
pn a golden ten-dollar piece, and of lofty bearing 
enough to have sat for that goddess's portrait. She 
had stayed in Frederick through the Rebel inroad, and 
kept the star-spangled banner where it would be safe, 
to unroll it as the last Rebel hoofs clattered off from 
the pavement of the town. 

Near by Lieutenant Abbott was an unhappy gentle- 
man, occupying a small chamber, and filling it with 
his troubles. When he gets well and plump, I know 
he will forgive me if I confess that I could not help 
smiling in the midst of my sympathy for him. He had 
been a well-favored man, he said, sweeping his hand 
in a semicircle, which implied that his acute-angled 
countenance had once filled the goodly curve he de- 
scribed. He was now a perfect Don Quixote to look 



28 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

upon. Weakness had made him querulous, as it does 
all of us, and he piped his grievances to me in a thin 
voice, with that finish of detail which chronic invalid- 
ism alone can command. He was starving, — he could 
not get what he wanted to eat. He was in need of 
stimulants, and he held up a pitiful two-ounce phial 
containing three thimblef uls of brandy, — his whole 
stock of that encouraging article. Him I consoled to 
the best of my ability, and afterwards, in some slight 
measure, supplied his wants. Feed this poor gentle- 
man up, as these good people soon will, and I should 
not know him, nor he himself. We are all egotists in 
sickness and debility. An animal has been defined as 
" a stomach ministered to by organs ; " and the great- 
est man comes very near this simple formula after a 
month or two of fever and starvation. 

James Grayden and his team pleased me well 
enough, and so I made a bargain with him to take us, 
the lady and myself, on our further journey as far as 
Middletown. As we were about starting from the 
front of the United States Hotel, two gentlemen pre- 
sented themselves and expressed a wish to be allowed 
to share our conveyance. I looked at them and con- 
vinced myself that they were neither Rebels in dis- 
guise, nor deserters, nor camp-followers, nor miscre- 
ants, but plain, honest men on a proper errand. The 
first of them I will pass over briefly. He was a young 
man of mild and modest demeanor, chaplain to a 
Pennsylvania regiment, which he was going to rejoin. 
He belonged to the Moravian Church, of which I had 
the misfortune to know little more than what I had 
learned from Southey's " Life of Wesley," and from 
the exquisite hymns we have borrowed from its rhap- 
sodists. The other stranger was a New Englander of 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 29 

respectable appearance, with a grave, hard, honest, 
hay-bearded face, who had come to serve the sick and 
wounded on the battle-field and in its immediate neigh- 
borhood. There is no reason why I should not men- 
tion his name, but I shall content myseK with calling 
him the Philanthropist. 

So we set forth, the sturdy wagon, the serviceable 
bays, with James Grayden their driver, the gentle 
lady, whose serene patience bore up through all de- 
lays and discomforts, the Chaplain, the Philanthropist, 
and myself, the teller of this story. 

And now, as we emerged from Frederick, we struck 
at once upon the trail from the great battle-field. The 
road was filled with straggling and wounded soldiers. 
All who could travel on foot, — multitudes with slight 
wounds of the upper limbs, the head, or face, — were 
told to take up their beds, — a light burden or none at 
all, — and walk. Just as the battle-field sucks every- 
thing into its red vortex for the conflict, so does it 
drive everything off in long, diverging rays after the 
fierce centripetal forces have met and neutralized each 
other. For more than a week there had been sharp 
fighting all along this road. Through the streets of 
Frederick, through Crampton's Gap, over South Moun- 
tain, sweeping at last the hills and the woods that skirt 
the windings of the Antietam, the long battle had 
travelled, like one of those tornadoes which tear their 
path through our fields and villages. The slain of 
higher condition, " embalmed " and iron-cased, were 
sliding off on the railways to their far homes ; the 
dead of the rank and file were being gathered up and 
committed hastily to the earth ; the gravely wounded 
were cared for hard by the scene of conflict, or pushed 
a little way along to the neighboring villages; while 



30 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

those wlio could walk were meeting us, as I have said, 
at every step in the road. It was a pitiable sight, 
truly pitiable, yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility 
of relief, that many single sorrows of small dimensions 
have wrought upon my feelings more than the sight of 
this great caravan of maimed pilgrims. The compan- 
ionship of so many seemed to make a joint-stock of 
their suffering ; it was next to impossible to individu= 
alize it, and so bring it home, as one can do with a sin* 
gie broken limb or aching wound. Then they were 
all of the male sex, and in the freshness or the prime 
of their strength. Though they tramped so wearily 
along, yet there was rest and kind nursing in store for 
them. These wounds they bore would be the medals 
they would show their children and grandchildren by 
and by. Who would not rather wear his decorations 
beneath his uniform than on it ? 

Yet among them were figures which arrested our at- 
tention and sympathy. Delicate boys, with more spirit 
than strength, flushed with fever or pale with exhaus- 
tion or haggard with suffering, dragged their weary 
limbs along as if each step would exhaust their slender 
store of strength. At the roadside sat or lay others, 
quite spent with their journey. Here and there was a 
house at which the wayfarers would stop, in the hope, 
I fear often vain, of getting refreshment ; and in one 
place was a clear, cool spring, where the little bands 
of the long procession halted for a few moments, as 
the trains that traverse the desert rest by its lountainSo 
My companions had brought a few peaches along with 
them, which the Philanthropist bestowed upon the 
tired and thirsty soldiers with a satisfaction which we 
all shared. I had with me a small flask of strong 
waters, to be used as a medicine in case of inward 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN.'* 31 

grief. From this, also, lie dispensed relief, without 
hesitation, to a poor fellow who looked as if he needed 
it. I rather admired the simplicity with which he ap- 
plied my limited means of solace to the first-comer 
who wanted it more than I ; a genuine benevolent im- 
pulse does not stand on ceremony, and had I perished 
of colic for want of a stimulus that night, I should not 
have reproached my friend the Philanthropist, any 
more than I grudged my other ardent friend the two 
dollars and more which it cost me to send the charita- 
ble message he left in my hands. 

It was a lovely country through which we were rid- 
ing. The hillsides rolled away into the distance, 
slanting up fair and broad to the sun, as one sees them 
in the open parts of the Berkshire Valley, at Lanes- 
borough, for instance, or in the many-hued mountain 
chalice at the bottom of which the Shaker houses of 
Lebanon have shaped themselves like a sediment of 
cubical crystals. The wheat was all garnered, and the 
land ploughed for a new crop. There was Indian 
corn standing, but I saw no pumpkins warming their 
yellow carapaces in the sunshine like so many turtles ; 
only in a single instance did I notice some wretched 
little miniature specimens in form and hue not unlike 
those colossal oranges of our cornfields. The rail- 
fences were somewhat disturbed, and the cinders of 
extinguished fires showed the use to which they had 
been applied. The houses along the road were not for 
the most part neatly kept ; the garden fences were 
poorly built of laths or long slats, and very rarely 
■of trim aspect. The men of this region seemed to 
ride in the saddle very generally, rather than drive. 
They looked sober and stern, less curious and lively 
than Yankees, and I fancied that a type of features 



32 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

familiar to us in the countenance of the late John 
Tyler, our accidental President, was frequently met 
with. The women were still more distinguishable 
from our New England pattern. Soft, sallow, succu- 
lent, delicately finished about the mouth and firmly 
shaped about the chin, dark-eyed, full-throated, they 
looked as if they had been grown in a land of olives. 
There was a little toss in their movement, full of mu- 
liebrity. I fancied there was something more of the 
duck and less of the chicken about them, as compared 
with the daughters of our leaner soil ; but these are 
mere impressions caught from stray glances, and if 
there is any offence in them, my fair readers may con- 
sider them all retracted. 

At intervals, a dead horse lay by the roadside, or in 
the fields, unburied, not grateful to gods or men. I 
saw no bird of prey, no ill-omened fowl, on my way 
to the carnival of death, or at the place where it had 
been held. The vulture of story, the crow of Talavera, 
the " twa corbies " of the ghastly ballad, are all from 
Nature, doubtless ; but no black wing was spread over 
these animal ruins, and no call to the banquet pierced 
through the heavy-laden and sickening air. 

Full in the middle of the road, caring little for 
whom or what they met, came long strings of army 
wagons, returning empty from the front after supplies. 
James Grayden stated it as his conviction that they 
had a little rather run into a fellow than not. I liked 
the looks of these equipages and their drivers ; they 
meant business. Drawn by mules mostly, six, I think, 
to a wagon, powdered well with dust, wagon, beast, and 
driver, they came jogging along the road, turning 
neither to right nor left, — some driven by bearded, 
solemn white men, some by careless, saucy-looking 



MY HUNT AFTER " THE CAPTAIN." 33 

negroes, of a blackness like that of anthracite or ob- 
sidian. There seemed to be nothing about them, dead 
or alive, that was not serviceable. Sometimes a mule 
would give out on the road ; then he was left where he 
lay, until by and by he would think better of it, and get 
up, when the first public wagon that came along would 
hitch him on, and restore him to the sphere of duty. 

It was evening when we got to Middletown. The 
gentle Isidj who had graced our homely conveyance 
with her company here left us. She found her hus- 
band, the gallant Colonel, in very comfortable quar- 
ters, well cared for, very weak from the effects of the 
fearful operation he had been compelled to undergo, 
but showing calm courage to endure as he had shown 
manly energy to act. It was a meeting full of hero- 
ism and tenderness, of which I heard more than there 
is need to tell. Health to the brave soldier, and 
peace to the household over which so fair a spirit pre- 
sides ! 

Dr. Thompson, the very active and intelligent sur- 
gical director of the hospitals of the place, took me 
in charge. He carried me to the house of a worthy 
and benevolent clergyman of the German Reformed 
Church, where I was to take tea and pass the night. 
What became of the Moravian chaplain I did not 
know ; but my friend the Philanthropist had evidently 
made up his mind to adhere to my fortunes. He fol- 
lowed me, therefore, to the house of the " Dominie," 
as a newspaper correspondent calls my kind host, and 
partook of the fare there furnished me. He with- 
drew with me to the apartment assigned for my 
slumbers, and slept sweetly on the same pillow where 
I waked and tossed. Nay, I do affirm that he did, 
unconsciously, I believe, encroach on that moiety of 



84 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

the couch which I had flattered myself was to be my 
own through the watches of the night, and that I was 
in serious doubt at one time whether I should not be 
gradually, but irresistibly, expelled from the bed 
which I had supposed destined for my sole possessiouo 
As Ruth clave unto Naomi, so my friend the Philan- 
thropist clave unto me. " Whither thou goest, I will 
go ; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge." A really 
kind, good man, full of zeal, determined to help some- 
body, and absorbed in his one thought, he doubted 
nobody's willingness to serve him, going, as he was, 
on a purely benevolent errand. When he reads this, 
as I hope he will, let him be assured of my esteem 
and respect; and if he gained any accommodation 
from being in my company, let me tell him that I 
learned a lesson from his active benevolence. I could, 
however, have wished to hear him laugh once before 
we parted, perhaps forever. He did not, to the best 
of my recollection, even smile during the whole period 
that we were in company. I am afraid that a light- 
some disposition and a relish for humor are not so 
common in those whose benevolence takes an active 
turn as in people of sentiment, who are always ready 
with their tears and abounding in passionate expres- 
sions of sympathy. Working philanthropy is a prac- 
tical specialty, requiring not a mere impulse, but a 
talent, with its peculiar sagacity for finding its objects, 
a tact for selecting its agencies, an organizing and ar- 
ranging faculty, a steady set of nerves, and a consti- 
tution such as Sallust describes in Catiline, patient 
of cold, of hunger, and of watching. Philanthropists 
are commonly grave, occasionally grim, and not very 
rarely morose. Their expansive social force is impris- 
oned as a working power, to show itself only through 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 35 

its legitimate pistons and cranks. The tighter the 
boiler, the less it whistles and sings at its work. 
When Dr. Waterhouse, in 1780, travelled with How- 
ard, on his tour among the Dutch prisons and hospi- 
tals, he found his temper and manners very different 
from what would have been expected. 

My benevolent companion having already made a 
preliminary exploration of the hospitals of the place, 
before sharing my bed with him, as above mentioned, 
I joined him in a second tour through them. The au- 
thorities of Middletown are evidently leagued with the 
surgeons of that place, for such a break-neck succession 
of pitfalls and chasms I have never seen in the streets 
of a civilized town. It was getting late in the even- 
ing when we began our rounds. The principal collec- 
tions of the wounded were in the churches. Boards 
were laid over the tops of the pews, on these some 
straw was spread, and on this the wounded lay, with 
little or no covering other than such scanty clothes as 
they had on. There were wounds of all degrees of 
severity, but I heard no groans or murmurs. Most of 
the sufferers were hurt in the limbs, some had under- 
gone amputation, and all had, I presume, received such 
attention as was required. Still, it was but a rough 
and dreary kind of comfort that the extemporized hos- 
pitals suggested. I could not help thinking the pa- 
tients must be cold ; but they were used to camp life, 
and did not! complain. The men who watched were 
not of the soft-handed variety of the race. One of 
them was smoking his pipe as he went from bed to bed. 
I saw one poor fellow who had been shot through the 
breast ; his breathing was labored, and he was tossing, 
anxious and restless. The men were debating about 
the opiate he was to take, and I was thankful that I 



36 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

happened there at the right moment to see that he was 
well narcotized for the night. Was it possible that 
my Captain could be lying on the straw in one of these 
places ? Certainly possible, but not probable ; but as 
the lantern was held over each bed, it was with a kind 
of thrill that I looked upon the features it illuminated. 
Many times as I went from hospital to hospital in my 
wanderings, I started as some faint resemblance, — the 
shade of a young man's hair, the outline of his half- 
turned face, — recalled the presence I was in search of. 
The face would turn towards me, and the momentary 
illusion would pass away, but still the fancy clung to 
me. There was no figure huddled up on its rude couch, 
none stretched at the roadside, none toiling languidly 
along the dusty pike, none passing in car or in ambu- 
lance, that I did not scrutinize, as if it might be that 
for which I was making my pilgrimage to the battle- 
field. 

" There are two wounded Secesh," said my compan- 
ion. I walked to the bedside of the first, who was an 
officer, a lieutenant, if I remember right, from North 
Carolina. He was of good family, son of a judge in 
one of the higher courts of his State, educated, pleasant, 
gentle, intelligent. One moment's intercourse with 
such an enemy, lying helpless and wounded among 
strangers, takes away all personal bitterness towards 
those with whom we or our children have been but a 
few hours before in deadly strife. The basest lie which 
the murderous contrivers of this Rebellion have told 
is that which tries to make out a difference of race in 
the men of the North and South. It would be worth 
a year of battles to abolish this delusion, though the 
great sponge of war that wiped it out were moistened 
with the best blood of the land. My Rebel was of 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 37 

slight, scholastic habit, and spoke as one accustomed 
to tread carefully among the parts of speech. It 
made my heart ache to see him, a man finished in the 
humanities and Christian culture, whom the sin of his 
forefathers and the crime of his rulers had set in bar- 
barous conflict against others of like training with his 
own, — a man who, but for the curse which our gen- 
eration is called on to expiate, would have taken his 
part in the beneficent task of shaping the intelligence 
and lifting the moral standard of a peaceful and 
united people. 

On Sunday morning, the twenty-first, having en- 
gaged James Grayden and his team, I set out with the 
Chaplain and the Philanthropist for Keedysville. Our 
track lay through the South Mountain Gap, and led us 
first to the town of Boonsborough, where, it will be re- 
membered, Colonel Dwight had been brought after the 
battle. We saw the positions occupied in the battle of 
South Mountain, and many traces of the conflict. In 
one situation a group of young trees was marked with 
shot, hardly one having escaped. As we walked by 
the side of the wagon, the Philanthropist left us for a 
while and climbed a hiU, where, along the line of a 
fence, he found traces of the most desperate fighting. 
A ride of some three hours brought us to Boonsbor- 
ough, where I roused the unfortunate army surgeon 
who had charge of the hospitals, and who was trying 
to get a little sleep after his fatigues and watchings. 
He bore this cross very creditably, and helped me to 
explore all places where my soldier might be lying 
among the crowds of wounded. After the useless 
search, I resumed my journey, fortified with a note of 
introduction to Dr. Letterman; also with a bale of 
oakum which I was to carry to that gentleman, this 



38 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

substance being employed as a substitute for lint. We 
were obliged also to procure a pass to Keedysville from 
tbe Provost Marshal of Boonsborough. As we came 
near the place, we learned that General McClellan's 
head quarters had been removed from this village some 
miles farther to the front. 

On entering the small settlement of Keedysville, a 
familiar face and figure blocked the way, like one of 
Bunyan's giants. The tall form and benevolent coun- 
tenance, set off by long, flowing hair, belonged to the 
excellent Mayor Frank B. Fay of Chelsea, who, like 
my Philanthropist, only still more promptly, had come 
to succor the wounded of the great battle. It was 
wonderful to see how his single personality pervaded 
this torpid little village ; he seemed to be the centre 
of all its activities. All my questions he answered 
clearly and decisively, as one who knew everything 
that was going on in the place. But the one question 
I had come ^ve hundred ijiiles to ask, — Where is 
Captain H. f — he could not answer. There were 
some thousands of wounded in the place, he told me, 
scattered about everywhere. It would be a long job 
to hunt up niy Captain ; the only way would be to go 
to every house and ask for him. Just then a medical 
officer came up. 

" Do you know anything of Captain H. of the Mas- 
sachusetts Twentieth? " 

" Oh yes ; he is staying in that house. I saw him 
there, doing very well." 

. A chorus of hallelujahs arose in my soul, but I kept 
them to myself. Now, then, for our twice-wounded 
volunteer, our young centurion whose double-barred 
shoulder-straps we have never yet looked upon. Let 
us observe the proprieties, however ; no swelling up- 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 39 

ward of the mother, — no hysterica passio^ — we do 
not like scenes. A cahn salutation, — then swallow 
and hold hard. That is about the programme. 

A cottage of squared logs, filled in with plaster, and 
whitewashed. A little yard before it, with a gate 
swinging. The door of the cottage ajar, — no one vis- 
ible as yet. I push open the door and enter. An old 
woman, Margaret Kitzmuller her name proves to be, 
is the first person I see. 

" Captain H. here ? " 

" Oh no, sir, — left yesterday morning for Hagers- 
town, — in a milk-cart." 

The Kitzmuller is a beady-eyed, cheery-looking an- 
cient woman, answers questions with a rising inflection, 
and gives a good account of the Captain, who got into 
the vehicle without assistance, and was in excellent 
spirits. Of course he had struck for Hagerstown as 
the terminus of the Cumberland Yalley Railroad, and 
was on his way to Philadelphia, vid Chambersburg 
and Harrisburg, if he were not already in the hospita- 
ble home of Walnut Street, where his friends were 
expecting him. 

I might follow on his track or return upon my own ; 
the distance was the same to Philadelphia through 
Harrisburg as through Baltimore. But it was very 
difficult, Mr. Fay told me, to procure any kind of con- 
veyance to Hagerstown ; and, on the other hand, I had 
James Grayden and his wagon to carry me back to 
Frederick. It was not likely that I should overtake 
the object of my pursuit with nearly thirty-six hours 
start, even if I could procure a conveyance that day. 
In the mean time James was getting impatient to be on 
his return, according to the direction of his employers. 
So I decided to go back with him. 



40 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

But there was the great battle-field only about three 
miles from Keedysville, and it was impossible to go 
without seeing that. James Grayden's directions were 
peremptory, but it was a case for the higher law. I 
must make a good offer for an extra couple of hours, 
such as would satisfy the owners of the wagon, and en= 
force it by a personal motive. I did this handsomely, 
and succeeded without difficulty. To add brilliancy to 
my enterprise, I invited the Chaplain and the Philan- 
thropist to take a free passage with me. 

We followed the road through the village for a 
space, then turned off to the right, and wandered 
somewhat vaguely, for want of precise directions, over 
the hills. Inquiring as we went, we forded a wide 
creek in which soldiers were washing their clothes, the 
name of which we did not then know, but which must 
have been the Antietam. At one point we met a 
party, women among them, bringing off various tro- 
phies they had picked up on the battle-field. Still 
wandering along, we were at last pointed to a hill in 
the distance, a part of the summit of which was cov- 
ered with Indian corn. There, we were told, some of 
the fiercest fighting of the day had been done. The 
fences were taken down so as to make a passage across 
the fields, and the tracks worn within the last few days 
looked like old roadsc We passed a fresh grave under 
a tree near the road. A board was nailed to the tree, 
bearing the name, as well as I could make it out, of 
Gardiner, of a New Hampshire regiment. 

On coming near the brow of the hill, we met a party 
carrying picks and spades. " How many ? " " Only 
one." The dead were nearly all buried, then, in this 
region of the field of strife. We stopped the wagon, 
and, getting out, began to look around us. Hard by 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 41 

was a large pile of muskets, scores, if not hundreds, 
wliich had been picked up, and were guarded for the 
Government. A long ridge of fresh gravel rose before 
us. A board stuck up in front of it bore this inscrip- 
tion, the first part of which was, I believe, not cor- 
rect : " The Rebel General Anderson and 80 Rebels 
are buried in this hole." Other smaller ridges were 
marked with the number of dead lying under them. 
The whole ground was strewed with fragments of 
clothing, haversacks, canteens, cap-boxes, bullets, car- 
tridge-boxes, cartridges, scraps of paper, portions of 
bread and meat. I saw two soldiers' caps that looked 
as though their owners had been shot through the 
head. In several places I noticed dark red patches 
where a pool of blood had curdled and caked, as some 
poor fellow poured his life out on the sod. I then 
wandered about in the cornfield. It surprised me to 
notice, that, though there was every mark of hard 
fighting having taken place here, the Indian corn was 
not generally trodden down. One of our cornfields is 
a kind of forest, and even when fighting, men avoid 
the tall stalks as if they were trees. At the edge of 
this cornfield lay a gray horse, said to have belonged 
to a Rebel colonel, who was killed near the same 
place. Not far off were two dead artillery horses in 
their harness. Another had been attended to by a 
burying-party, who had thrown some earth over him ; 
but his last bed-clothes were too short, and his legs 
stuck out stark and stiff from beneath the gravel cov- 
erlet. It was a great pity that we had no intelligent 
guide to explain to us the position of that portion of 
the two armies which fought over this ground. There 
was a shallow trench before we came to the cornfield, 
too narrow for a road, as I should think, too elevated 



42 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

for a water-course, and wMch seemed to have been 
used as a rifle-pit. At any rate, there had been hard 
fighting in and about it. This and the cornfield may 
serve to identify the part of the ground we visited, if 
any who fought there should ever look over this paper. 
The opposing tides of battle must have blended their 
waves at this point, for portions of gray uniform were 
mingled with the " garments rolled in blood " torn 
from our own dead and wounded soldiers. I picked 
up a Rebel canteen, and one of our own, — but there 
was something repulsive about the trodden and stained 
relics of the stale battle-field. It was like the table of 
some hideous orgy left uncleared, and one turned away 
disgusted from its broken fragments and muddy heel- 
taps. A bullet or two, a button, a brass plate from a 
soldier's belt, served well enough for mementos of my 
visit, with a letter which I picked up, directed to Rich- 
mond, Virginia, its seal unbroken. " N. C. Cleveland 
County. E. Wright to J. Wright." On the other 
side, " A few lines from W. L. Vaughn," who has just 
been writing for the wife to her husband, and contin- 
ues on his own account. The postscript, " tell John 
that nancy's folks are all well and has a verry good 
Little Crop of corn a growing.'* I wonder, if, by one 
of those strange chances of which I have seen so many, 
this number or leaf of the " Atlantic " will not sooner 
or later find its way to Cleveland County, North Caro- 
lina, and E. Wright, widow of James Wright, and 
Nancy's folks, get from these sentences the last glimpse 
of husband and friend as he threw up his arms and 
fell in the bloody cornfield of Antietam ? I will keep 
this stained letter for them until peace comes back^ 
if it comes in my time, and my pleasant North Car- 
olina Rebel of the Middletown Hospital will, perhaps, 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 43 

look these poor people up, and tell tliem where to send 
for it. 

On the battle-field I parted with my two compan- 
ions, the Chaplain and the Philanthropist. They were 
going to the front, the one to find his regiment, the 
other to look for those who needed his assistance. We 
exchanged cards and farewells, I mounted the wagon, 
the horses' heads were turned homewards, my two 
companions went their way, and I saw them no more. 
On my way back, I fell into talk with James Gray- 
den. Born in England, Lancashire ; in this country 
since he was four years old. Had nothing to care for 
but an old mother ; did n't know what he should do if 
he lost her. Though so long in this country, he had 
all the simplicity and childlike light-heartedness which 
belong to the Old World's people. He laughed at the 
smallest pleasantry, and showed his great white English 
teeth ; he took a joke without retorting by an imper- 
tinence ; he had a very limited curiosity about all that 
was going on ; he had small store of information ; he 
lived chiefly in his horses, it seemed to me. His quiet 
animal nature acted as a pleasing anodyne to my re- 
curring fits of anxiety, and I liked his frequent 
" 'Deed I don't know, .sir," better than I have some- 
times relished the large discourse of professors and 
other very wise men. 

I have not much to say of the road which we were 
travelling for the second time. Reaching Middletown, 
my first call was on the wounded Colonel and his lady. 
She gave me a most touching account of all the suf- 
fering he had gone through with his shattered limb 
before he succeeded in finding a shelter ; showing the 
terrible want of proper means of transportation of the 
wounded after the battle. It occurred to me, while at 



44 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

this house, that I was more or less famished, and for 
the first time in my life I begged for a meal, which 
the kind family with whom the Colonel was staying 
most graciously furnished me. 

After tea, there came in a stout army surgeon, a 
Highlander by birth, educated in Edinburgh, with 
whom I had pleasant, not unstimulating talk. He 
had been brought very close to that immane and ne- 
fandous Burke-and-Hare business which made the 
blood of civilization run cold in the year 1828, and 
told me, in a very calm way, with an occasional pinch 
from the mull, to refresh his memory, some of the 
details of those frightful murders, never rivalled in 
horror until the wretch DumoUard, who kept a private 
cemetery for his victims, was dragged into the light 
of day. He had a good deal to say, too, about the 
Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and the 
famous preparations, mercurial and the rest, which I 
remember well having seen there, — the " sudahit 
multum^'' and others, — also of our New York Pro- 
fessor Carnochan's handiwork, a specimen of which I 
once admired at the New York College. But the 
doctor was not in a happy frame of mind, and seemed 
willing to forget the present in . the past : things went 
wrong, somehow, and the time was out of joint with 
Lim. 

Dr. Thompson, kind, cheerful, companionable, of- 
fered me half his own wide bed, in the house of Dr. 
Baer, for my second night in Middletown. Here I 
lay awake again another night. Close to the house 
stood an ambulance in which was a wounded Rebel 
officer, attended by one of their own surgeons. He 
was calling out in a loud voice, all night long, as it 
seemed to me, " Doctor ! Doctor ! Driver I Water ! " 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 45 

in loud, complaining tones, I have no doubt of real 
suffering, but in strange contrast with the silent pa- 
tience which was the almost universal rule. 

The courteous Dr. Thompson will let me tell here 
an odd coincidence, trivial, but having its interest as 
one of a series. The Doctor and myself lay in the 
bed, and a lieutenant, a friend of his, slept on the sofa, 
At night, I placed my match-box, a Scotch one, of the 
Macpherson-plaid pattern, which I bought years ago, 
on the bureau, just where I could put my hand upon 
it. I was the last of the three to rise in the morning, 
and on looking for my pretty match-box, I found it 
was gone. This was rather awkward, — not on ac- 
count of the loss, but of the unavoidable fact that 
one of my fellow-lodgers must have taken it. I must 
try to find out what it meant. 

" By the way. Doctor, have you seen anything of a 
little plaid-pattern match-box ? " 

The Doctor put his hand to his pocket, and, to his 
own huge surprise and my great gratification, pulled 
out two match-boxes exactly alike, both printed with 
the Macpherson plaid. One was his, the other mine, 
which he had seen lying round, and naturally took for 
his own, thrusting it into his pocket, where it found 
its twin-brother from the same workshop. In memory 
of which event, we exchanged boxes, like two Homeric 
heroes. 

This curious coincidence illustrates well enough some 
supposed cases of plagiarism of which I will mention 
one where my name figured. When a little poem 
called " The Two Streams " was first printed, a writer 
in the New York " Evening Post " virtually accused the 
author of it of borrowing the thought from a baccalau- 
reate sermon of President Hopkins of Williamstown, 



46 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

and printed a quotation from that discourse, which, as 
I thought, a thief or catchpoll might well consider as 
establishing a fair presumption that it was so bor- 
rowed. I was at the same time wholly unconscious of 
ever having met with the discourse or the sentence 
which the verses were most like, nor do I believe I 
ever had seen or heard either. Some time after this, 
happening to meet my eloquent cousin, Wendell Phil- 
lips, I mentioned the fact to him, and he told me that 
Ae had once used the special image said to be bor- 
rowed, in a discourse delivered at Williamstown. On 
relating this to my friend Mr. Buchanan Read, he in- 
formed me that Ae too, had used the image, — per* 
haps referring to his poem called " The Twins." He 
thought Tennyson had used it also. The parting of 
the streams on the Alps is poetically elaborated in a 
passage attributed to " M. Loisne," printed in .the 
" Boston Evening Transcript " for October 23, 1859. 
Captain, afterwards Sir Francis Head, speaks of the 
showers parting on the Cordilleras, one portion going 
to the Atlantic, one to the Pacific. I found the image 
running loose in my mind, without a halter. It sug- 
gested itself as an illustration of the will, and I 
worked the poem out by the aid of Mitchell's School 
Atlas. — The spores of a great many ideas are float- 
ing about in the atmosphere. We no more know 
where all the growths of our mind came from, than 
where the lichens which eat the names off from the 
gravestones borrowed the germs that gave them birth. 
The two match-boxes were just alike, but neither was 
a plagiarism. 

In the morning I took to the same wagon once 
more, but, instead of James Grayden, I was to have 
for my driver a young man who spelt his name " Phil- 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 47 

lip Ottenlieimer," and whose features at once showed 
hiin to be an Israelite. I found him agreeable enough, 
and disposed to talk. So I asked him many ques- 
tions about his religion, and got some answers that 
sound strangely in Christian ears. He was from Wit- 
tenberg, and had been educated in strict Jewish f ash= 
ion. From his childhood he had read Hebrew, but 
was not much of a scholar otherwise. A young per- 
son of his race lost caste utterly by marrying a Chris- 
tian. The Founder of our religion was considered by 
the Israelites to have been " a right smart man and a 
great doctor." But the horror with which the reading 
of the New Testament by any young person of their 
faith would be regarded was as great, I judged by 
his language, as that of one of our straitest sectaries 
woidd be, if he found his son or daughter perusing the 
" Age of Reason." 

In approaching Frederick, the singular beauty of 
its clustered spires struck me very much, so that I was 
not surprised to find "Fair- View" laid down about 
this point on a railroad map. I wish some wandering 
photographer would take a picture of the place, a stere- 
oscopic one, if possible, to show how gracefully, how 
charmingly, its group of steeples nestles among tbe 
Maryland hills. The town had a poetical look from a 
distance, as if seers and dreamers might dwell there^ 
The first sign I read, on entering its long street, might 
perhaps be considered as confirming my remote im- 
pression. It bore these words: "Miss Ogle, Past, 
Present, and Future." On arriving, I visited Lieu- 
tenant Abbott, and the attenuated unhappy gentleman, 
his neighbor, sharing between them as my parting 
gift what I had left of the balsam known to the Phar- 
macopoeia as Spiritus Vini Gallici. I took advan- 



48 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

tage of General Sliriver's always open door to write a 
letter home, but had not time to partake of his offered 
hospitality. The railroad bridge over the Monocacy 
had been rebuilt since I passed through Frederick, and 
we trundled along over the track toward Baltimore. 

It was a disappointment, on reaching the Eutaw 
House, where I had ordered all communications to be 
addressed, to find no telegTaphic message from Phila- 
delphia or Boston, stating that Captain H. had arrived 
at the former place, " wound doing well in good spir- 
its expects to leave soon for Boston." After all, it 
was no great matter; the Captain was, no doubt, 
snugly lodged before this in the house called Beautiful, 
at * * * * Walnut Street, where that "grave and 
beautiful damsel named Discretion " had already wel- 
comed him, smiling, though " the water stood in her 
eyes," and had " called out Prudence, Piety, and Char- 
ity, who, after a little more discourse with him, had 
Mm into the family." 

The friends I had met at the Eutaw House had all 
gone but one, the lady of an officer from Boston, who 
was most amiable and agreeable, and whose benevo- 
lence, as I afterwards learned, soon reached the inva- 
lids I had left suffering at Frederick. General Wool 
still walked the corridors, inexpansive, with Fort 
McHenry on his shoulders, and Baltimore in his 
breeches-pocket, and his courteous aid again pressed 
upon me his kind offices. About the doors of the ho- 
tel the news-boys cried the papers in plaintive, wailing 
tones, as diffe;rent from the sharp accents of their Bos- 
ton counterparts as a sigh from the southwest is from 
a northeastern breeze. To understand what they said 
was, of course, impossible to any but an educated ear, 
and if I made out " Stoarr " and " Clipp'rr," it was 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 49 

because I knew beforehand what must be the burden 
of their advertising coranach. 

I set out for Philadelphia on the morrow, Tuesday 
the twenty-third, there beyond question to meet my 
Captain, once more united to his brave woimded com- 
panions under that roof which covers a household of as 
noble hearts as ever throbbed with human sympathies. 
Back River, Bush River, Gunpowder Creek, — lives 
there the man with soul so dead that his memory has 
cerements to wrap up these senseless names in the 
same envelopes with their meaningless localities? But 
the Susquehanna, — the broad, the beautiful, the his- 
torical, the poetical Susquehanna, — the river of Wy- 
oming and of Gertrude, dividing the shores where 

*' Aye those smmy mountains haK-way down 
Would echo flageolet from some romantic town," — 

did not my heart renew its allegiance to the poet who 
has made it lovely to the imagination as well as to the 
eye, and so identified his fame with the noble stream 
that it " rolls mingling with his fame forever ? " The 
prosaic traveller perhaps remembers it better from the 
fact that a great sea-monster, in the shape of a steam- 
boat, takes him, sitting in the car, on its back, and 
swims across with him like Arion's dolphin, — also 
that mercenary men on board offer him canvas-backs 
in the season, and ducks of lower degree at other 
periods. 

At Philadelphia again at last ! Drive fast, O col- 
ored man and brother, to the house called Beautiful, 
where my Captain lies sore wounded, waiting for the 
sound of the chariot-wheels which bring to his bedside 
the face and the voice nearer than any save one to his 
heart in this his hour of pain and weakness ! Up a, 
long street with white shutters and white steps to aU 



50 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

the houses. Off at right angles into another long 
street with white shutters and white steps to all the 
houses. Off again at another right angle into still an- 
other long street with white shutters and white steps 
to all the houses. The natives of this city pretend to 
know one street from another by some individual dif- 
ferences of aspect ; but the best way for a stranger to 
distinguish the streets he has been in from others is to 
make a cross or other mark on the white shutters. 

This corner-house is the one. Ring softly, — for the 
Lieutenant-Colonel lies there with a dreadfully wounded 
arm, and two sons of the family, one wounded like 
the Colonel, one fighting with death in the fog of a 
typhoid fever, will start with fresh pangs at the least 
sound you can make. I entered the house, but no cheer- 
ful smile met me. The sufferers were each of them 
thought to be in a critical condition. The fourth bed, 
waiting its tenant day after day, was still empty. Not 
a word from rtiy Ca'ptain. 

Then, foolish, fond body that I was, my heart sank 
within me. Had he been taken ill on the road, per- 
haps been attacked with those formidable symptoms 
which sometimes come on suddenly after wounds that 
seemed to be doing well enough, and was his life ebb- 
ing away in some lonely cottage, nay, in some cold 
barn or shed, or at the wayside, unknown, uncared for ? 
Somewhere between Philadelphia and Hagerstown, if 
not at the latter town, he must be, at any rate. I must 
sweep the hundred and eighty miles between these 
places as one would sweep a chamber where a precious 
pearl had been dropped. I must have a companion 
in my search, partly to help me look about, and partly 
because I was getting nervous and felt lonely. Char- 
ley said he would go with me, — Charley, my Captain's 



MY HUNT AFTER " THE CAPTAIN." 61 

beloved friend, gentle, but full of spirit and liveliness, 
cultivated, social, affectionate, a good talker, a most 
agreeable letter-writer, observing, with large relish of 
life, and keen sense of humor. He was not well 
enough to go, some of the timid ones said ; but he an- 
swered by packing his carpet-bag, and in an hour or 
two we were on the Pennsylvania Central Railroad in 
full blast for Harrisburg. 

I should have been a forlorn creature but for the 
presence of my companion. In his delightful company 
I half forgot my anxieties, which, exaggerated as they 
may seem now, were not unnatural after what I had 
seen of the confusion and distress that had followed 
the great battle, nay, which seem almost justified by 
the recent statement that " high officers " were buried 
after that battle whose names were never ascertained. 
I noticed little matters, as usual. The road was filled 
in between the rails with cracked stones, such as are 
used for macadamizing streets. They keep the dust 
down, I suppose, for I could not think of any other 
use for them. By and by the glorious valley which 
stretches along through Chester and Lancaster Counties 
opened upon us. Much as I had heard of the fertile 
regions of Pennsylvania, the vast scale and the uni- 
form luxuriance of this region astonished me. The 
grazing pastures were so green, the fields were under 
such perfect culture, the cattle looked so sleek, the 
houses were so comfortable, the barns so ample, the 
fences so well kept, that I did not wonder, when I was 
told that this region was called the England of Penn- 
sylvania. The people whom we saw were, like the 
cattle, well nourished ; the young women looked round 
and wholesome. 

" Grass makes gh'ls,^'' I said to my companion, and 



62 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

left him to work out my Orphic saying, thinking to 
myself, that as guano makes grass, it was a legitimate 
conclusion that Ichaboe must be a nursery of female 
loveliness. 

As the train stopped at the different stations, I in- 
quired at each if they had any wounded officers. None 
as yet ; the red rays of the battle-field had not streamed 
off so far as this. Eveijing found us in the cars; 
they lighted candles in spring - candle - sticks ; odd 
enough I thought it in the land of oil-wells and un- 
measured floods of kerosene. Some fellows turned up 
the back of a seat so as to make it horizontal, and be- 
gan gambling, or pretending to gamble ; it looked as 
if they were trying to pluck a young countryman ; but 
appearances are deceptive, and no deeper stake than 
" drinks for the crowd " seemed at last to be involved. 
But remembering that murder has tried of late years 
to establish itself as an institution in the cars, I was 
less tolerant of the doings of these " sportsmen " who 
tried to turn our public conveyance into a travelling 
Frascati. They acted as if they were used to it, and 
nobody seemed to pay much attention to their man- 
oeuvres. 

We arrived at Harrisburg in the course of the even- 
ing, and attempted to find our way to the Jones House, 
to which we had been commended. By some mistake, 
intentional on the part of somebody, as it may have 
been, or purely accidental, we went to the Herr House 
instead. I entered my name in the book, with that of 
my companion. A plain, middle-aged man stepped up, 
read it to himself in low tones, and coupled to it a lit- 
erary title by which I have been sometimes known. 
He proved to be a graduate of Brown University, and 
had heard a certain Phi Beta Kappa poem delivered 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 63 

there a good many years ago. I remembered it, too ; 
Professor Goddard, whose sudden and singular death 
left such lasting regret, was the Orator. I recollect 
that while I was speaking a drum went by the church, 
and how I was disgusted to see all the heads near the 
windows thrust out of them, as if the building were on 
fire. Cedat armis toga. The clerk in the office, a 
mild, pensive, unassuming young man, was very polite 
in his manners, and did all he could to make us com- 
fortable. He was of a literary turn, and knew one of 
his guests in his character of author. At tea, a nuld 
old gentleman, with white hair and beard, sat next 
us. He, too, had come hunting after his son, a lieu- 
tenant in a Pennsylvania regiment. Of these, father 
and son, more presently. 

After tea we went to look up Dr. Wilson, chief med- 
ical officer of the hospitals in the place, who was stay- 
ing at the Brady House. A magnificent old toddy- 
mixer, Bardolphian in hue, and stern of aspect, as all 
grog-dispensers must be, accustomed as they are to 
dive through the features of men to the bottom of their 
souls and pockets to see whether they are solvent to 
the amount of sixpence, answered my question by a 
wave of one hand, the other being engaged in carrying 
a dram to his lips. His superb indifference gratified 
my artistic feeling more than it wounded my personal 
sensibilities. Anything really superior in its line 
claims my homage, and this man was the ideal bar- 
tender, above all vulgar passions, untouched by com- 
monplace sympathies, himself a lover of the liquid hap- 
piness he dispenses, and filled with a fine scorn of all 
those lesser felicities conferred by love or fame or 
wealth or any of the roundabout agencies for which 
his fiery elixir is the cheap, all-powerful substitute. 



54 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

Dr. Wilson was in bed, though it was early in the 
evening, not having slept for I don't know how many 
nights. 

" Take my card up to him, if you please." 

" This way, sir." 

A man who has not slept for a fortnight or so is not 
expected to be as affable, when attacked in his bed, as 
a French Princess of old time at her morning recep- 
tions. Dr. Wilson turned toward me, as I entered, 
without effusion, but without rudeness. His thick, 
dark moustache was chopped off square at the lower 
edge of the upper lip, which implied a decisive, if not 
a peremptory, style of character. 

I am Dr. So-and-So of Hubtown, looking after my 
wounded son. (I gave my name and said Boston^ of 
course, in reality.) 

Dr. Wilson leaned on his elbow and looked up in 
my face, his features growing cordial. Then he put 
out his hand, and good-humoredly excused his recep- 
tion of me. The day before, as he told me, he had 
dismissed from the service a medical man hailing from 
********, Pennsylvania, bearing my last name, pre- 
ceded by the same two initials ; and he supposed, when 
my card came up, it was this individual who was dis- 
turbing his slumbers. The coincidence was so unlikely 
a priori^ unless some forlorn parent without antece- 
dents had named a child after me, that I could not 
help cross-questioning the Doctor, who assured me de- 
liberately that the fact was just as he had said, even 
to the somewhat unusual initials. Dr. Wilson very 
kindly furnished me all the information in his power, 
gave me directions for telegraphing to Chambersburg, 
and showed every disposition to serve me. 

On returning to the Herr House, we found the mild, 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 55 

white-haired old gentleman in a very happy state. He 
had just discovered his son, in a comfortable condition, 
at the United States Hotel. He thought that he could 
probably give us some information which would prove 
interesting. To the United States Hotel we repaired, 
then, in company with our kind-hearted old friend, 
who evidently wanted to see me as happy as himself. 
He went up-stairs to his son's chamber, and presently 
came down to conduct us there. 

Lieutenant P , of the Pennsylvania th, 

was a very fresh, bright-looking young man, lying in 
bed from the effects of a recent injury received in ac- 
tion. A grape-shot, after passing through a post and 
a board, had struck him in the hip, bruising, but not 
penetrating or breaking. He had good news for me. 

That very afternoon, a party of wounded officers 
had passed through Harrisburg, going East. He had 
conversed in the bar-room of this hotel with one of 
them, who was wounded about the shoulder (it might 
be the lower part of the neck), and had his arm in a 
sling. He belonged to the Twentieth Massachusetts ; 
the Lieutenant saw that he was a Captain, by the two 
bars on his shoulder-strap. His name was my family- 
name ; he was tall and youthful, like my Captain. At 
four o'clock he left in the train for Philadelphia. 
Closely questioned, the Lieutenant's evidence was as 
round, complete, and lucid as a Japanese sphere of 
rock-crystal. 

Te Deum laudamus ! The Lord's name be praised ! 
The dead pain in the semilunar ganglion (which I 
must remind my reader is a kind of stupid, unreason- 
ing brain, beneath the pit of the stomach, common to 
man and beast, which aches in the supreme moments 
of life, as when the dam loses her young ones, or the 



56 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

wild horse is lassoed) stopped short. There was a 
feeling as if I had slipped off a tight boot, or cut a 
strangling garter, — only it was all over my system. 
What more could I ask to assure me of the Captain's 
safety ? As soon as the telegraph office opens to-mor- 
row morning we will send a message to our friends in 
Philadelphia, and get a reply, doubtless, which will 
settle the whole matter. 

The hopeful morrow dawned at last, and the mes- 
sage was sent accordingly. In due time, the following 
reply was received : — 

" Phil Sept 24 I think the report you have heard 
that W [the Captain] has gone East must be an error 
we have not seen or heard of him here M L H " 

De peofundis clamavi ! He could not have 
passed through Philadelphia without visiting the house 
called Beautiful, where he had been so tenderly cared 
for after his wound at Ball's Bluff, and where those 
whom he loved were lying in grave peril of life or 
limb. Yet he did pass through Harrisburg, going 
East, going to Philadelphia, on his way home. Ah, 
this is it ! He must have taken the late night-train 
from Philadelphia for New York, in his impatience to 
reach home. There is such a train, not down in the 
guide-book, but we were assured of the fact at the 
Harrisburg depot. By and by came the reply from 
Dr. Wilson's telegraphic message : nothing had been 
heard of the Captain at Chambersburg. Still later, 
another message came from our Philadelphia friend, 
saying that he was seen on Friday last at the house 

of Mrs. K , a well-known Union lady in Hagers- 

town. Now this could not be true, for he did not 
leave Keedysville until Saturday ; but the name of 



MY HUNT AFTEE " THE CAPTAIN.'' 57 

the lady furnished a clew by which we could probably 
track him. A telegram was at once sent to Mrs. 
K , asking information. It was transmitted im- 
mediately, but when the answer would be received was 
uncertain, as the Government almost monopolized tho 
line. I was, on the whole, so well satisfied that the 
Captain had gone East, that, unless something were 
heard to the contrary, I proposed following him in the 
late train leaving a little after midnight for Philadel- 
phia. 

This same morning we visited several of the tempo- 
rary hospitals, churches and school-houses, where the 
wounded were lying. In one of these, after looking 
round as usual, I asked aloud, " Any Massachusetts 
men here ? " Two bright faces lifted themselves from 
their pillows and welcomed me by name. The one 
nearest me was private John B. Noyes of Company 
B, Massachusetts Thirteenth, son of my old college 
class-tutor, now the reverend and learned Professor of 
Hebrew, etc., in Harvard University. His neighbor 
was Corporal Armstrong of the same Company. Both 
were slightly wounded, doing well. I learned then 
and since from Mr. Noyes that they and their com- 
rades were completely overwhelmed by the attentions 
of the good people of Harrisburg, — that the ladies 
brought them fruits and flowers, and smiles, better 
than either, — and that the little boys of the place 
were almost fighting for the privilege of doing their 
errands. I am afraid there will be a good many 
hearts pierced in this war that will have no bullet- 
mark to show. 

There were some heavy hours to get rid of, and we 
thought a visit to Camp Curtin might lighten some of 
them, A rickety wagon carried us to the camp, in 



58 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

company with a young woman from Troy, who had a 
basket of good things with her for a sick brother. 
" Poor boy I he will be sure to die," she said. The 
rustic sentries uncrossed their muskets and let us in. 
The camp was on a fair plain, girdled with hills, spa- 
cious, well kept apparently, but did not present any 
peculiar attraction for us. The visit would have been 
a dull one, had we not happened to get sight of a sin- 
gular-looking set of human beings in the distance. 
They were clad in stuff of different hues, gray and 
brown being the leading shades, but both subdued by 
a neutral tint, such as is wont to harmonize the va- 
riegated apparel of travel-stained vagabonds. They 
looked slouchy, listless, torpid, — an ill-conditioned 
crew, at first sight, made up of such fellows as an old 
woman would drive away from her hen-roost with a 
broomstick. Yet these were estrays from the fiery 
army which has given our generals so much trouble, 
— " Secesh prisoners," as a bystander told us. A talk 
with them might be profitable and entertaining. But 
they were tabooed to the common visitor, and it was 
necessary to get inside of the line which separated us 
from them. 

A solid, square captain was standing near by, to 
whom we were referred. Look a man calmly through 
the very centre of his pupils and ask him for anything 
with a tone implying entire conviction that he will 
grant it, and he will very commonly consent to the 
thing asked, were it to commit hari-kari. The Captain 
acceded to my postulate, and accepted my friend as 
a corollary. As one string of my own ancestors was of 
Batavian origin, I may be permitted to say that my new 
friend was of the Dutch type, like the Amsterdam gaL 
lots, broad in the beam, capacious in the hold, and cal 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 59 

culated to carry a heavy cargo rather than to make 
fast time. He must have been in politics at some 
time or other, for he made orations to all the " Se- 
cesh," in which he explained to them that the United 
States considered and treated them like children, and 
enforced upon them the ridiculous impossibility of the 
Rebels' attempting to do anything against such a 
power as that of the National Government. 

Much as his discourse edified them and enlightened 
me, it interfered somewhat with my little plans of en- 
tering into frank and friendly talk with some of these 
poor fellows, for whom I could not help feeling a kind 
of human sjrmpathy, though I am as venomous a hater 
of the Rebellion as one is like to find under the stars 
and stripes. It is fair to take a man prisoner. It is 
fair to make speeches to a man. But to take a man 
prisoner and then make speeches to him while in dur- 
ance is not fair. 

X began a few pleasant conversations, which would 
have come to something but for the reason assigned. 

One old fellow had a long beard, a drooping eyelid, 
and a black clay pipe in his mouth. He was a Scotch- 
man from Ayr, dour enough, and little disposed to be 
communicative, though I tried him with the "Twa 
Briggs," and, like all Scotchmen, he was a reader of 
" Burrns." He professed to feel no interest in the 
cause for which he was fighting, and was in the army, 
I judged, only from compulsion. There was a wild- 
haired, unsoaped boy, with pretty, foolish features 
enough, who looked as if he might be about seventeen, 
as he said he was. I give my question^ and his an* 
swers literally. 

" What State do you come from ? " 

" Georgy," 



60 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

" What part of Georgia ? " 

— [How odd that is ! My father was settled for 
seven years as pastor over the church at Midway, 
Georgia, and this youth is very probably a grandson 
or great grandson of one of his parishioners.] — 

" Where did you go to church when you were at 
home ? " 

" Never went inside 'f a church b't once in m' life." 

" What did you do before you became a soldier ? " 

"Nothin'." 

" What do you mean to do when you get back ? " 

" Nothin'." 

Who could have any other feeling than pity for this 
poor human weed, this dwarfed and etiolated soul, 
doomed by neglect to an existence but one degree 
above that of the idiot ? 

With the group was a lieutenant, buttoned close in 
his gray coat, — one button gone, perhaps to make a 
breastpin for some fair traitorous bosom. A short, 
stocky man, undistinguishable from one of the " sub- 
ject race " by any obvious meanderings of the sangre 
azul on his exposed surfaces. He did not say much, 
possibly because he was convinced by the statements 
and arguments of the Dutch captain. He had on 
strong, iron-heeled shoes, of English make, which he 
said cost him seventeen dollars in Richmond. 

I put the question, in a quiet, friendly way, to sev- 
eral of the prisoners, what they were fighting for. 
One answered, " For our homes." Two or three oth- 
ers said they did not know, and manifested great in- 
difference to the whole matter, at which another of 
their number, a sturdy fellow, took offence, and mut- 
tered opinions strongly derogatory to those who would 



MY HUNT AFTER " THE CAPTAIN." 61 

not stand up for the cause tliey had been fighting for. 
A feeble, attenuated old man, who wore the Rebel 
uniform, if such it could be called, stood by without 
showing any sign of intelligence. It was cutting very 
close to the bone to carve such a shred of humanity 
from the body politic to make a soldier of. 

We were just leaving, when a face attracted me, 
and I stopped the party. " That is the true Southern 
type," I said to my companion. A young fellow, a 
little over twenty, rather tall, slight, with a perfectly 
smooth, boyish cheek, delicate, somewhat high fea- 
tures, and a fine, almost feminine mouth, stood at the 
opening of his tent, and as we turned towards him 
fidgeted a little nervously with one hand at the loose 
canvas, while he seemed at the same time not unwill- 
ing to talk. He was from Mississippi, he said, had 
been at Georgetown College, and was so far imbued 
with letters that even the name of the literary humil- 
ity before him was not new to his ears. Of course I 
found it easy to come into magnetic relation with him, 
and to ask him without incivility what he was fighting 
for. " Because I like the excitement of it," he an- 
swered. I know those fighters with women's mouths 
and boys' cheeks. One such from the circle of my 
own friends, sixteen years old, slipped away from his 
nursery, and dashed in under an assumed name among 
the red-legged Zouaves, in whose company he got an 
ornamental bullet-mark in one of the earliest conflicts 
of the war. 

" Did you ever see a genuine Yankee ? " said my 
Philadelphia friend to the young Mississippian. 

" I have shot at a good many of them," he replied, 
modestly, his woman's mouth stirring a little, with a 
pleasant, dangerous smile. 



62 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

The Dutch captain here put his foot into the con- 
versation, as his ancestors used to put theirs into the 
scale, when they were buying furs of the Indians by 
weight, — so much for the weight of a hand, so much 
for the weight of a foot. It deranged the balance of 
our intercourse; there was no use in throwing a fly 
where a paving-stone had just splashed into the water, 
and I nodded a good-by to the boy-fighter, thinking 
how much pleasanter it was for my friend the Captain 
to address him with unanswerable arguments and 
crushing statements in his own tent than it would be 
to meet him upon some remote picket station and offer 
his fair proportions to the quick eye of a youngster 
who would draw a bead on him before he had time to 
say dunder and hlixum. 

We drove back to the town. No message. After 
dinner still no message. Dr. Cuyler, Chief Army 
Hospital Inspector, is in town, they say. Let us hunt 
him up, — perhaps he can help us. 

We found him at the Jones House. A gentleman 
of large proportions, but of lively temperament, his 
frame knit in the North, I think, but ripened in Geor- 
gia, incisive, prompt but good-humored, wearing his 
broad-brimmed, steeple-crowned felt hat with the least 
possible tilt on one side, — a sure sign of exuberant 
vitality in a mature and dignified person like him, — 
business-like in his ways, and not to be interrupted 
while occupied with another, but giving himself up 
heartily to the claimant who held him for the time. 
He was so genial, so cordial, so encouraging, that it 
seemed as if the clouds, which had been thick all the 
morning, broke away as we came into his presence, and 
the sunshine of his large nature filled the air all around 
us. He took the matter in hand at once, as if it were 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 63 

his own private affair. In ten minutes he had a sec- 
ond telegraphic message on its way to Mrs. K at 

Hagerstown, sent through the Government channel 
from the State Capitol, — one so direct and urgent 
that I should be sure of an answer to it, whatever be- 
came of the one 1 had sent in the morning. 

While tliis was going on, we hired a dilapidated 
barouche, driven by an odd young native, neither boy 
nor man, " as a codling when 't is almost an apple," 
who said wery for very, simple and sincere, who smiled 
faintly at our pleasantries, always with a certain re- 
serve of suspicion, and a gleam of the shrewdness that 
all men get who live in the atmosphere of horses. He 
drove us round by the Capitol grounds, white with 
tents, which were disgraced in my eyes by unsoldierly 
scrawls in huge letters, thus: The Seven Blooms- 
BTJEY Brothers, Devil's Hole, and similar inscrip- 
tions. Then to the Beacon Street of Harrisburg, which 
looks upon the Susquehanna instead of the Common, 
and shows a long front of handsome houses with fair 
gardens. The river is pretty nearly a mile across here, 
but very shallow now. The codling told us that a 
Rebel spy had been caught trying its fords a little 
while ago, and was now at Camp Curtin with a heavy 
ball chained to his leg, — a popular story, but a lie. 
Dr. Wilson said. A little farther along we came to 
the barkless stump of the tree to which Mr. Harris, the 
Cecrops of the city named after him, was tied by the 
Indians for some unpleasant operation of scalping or 
roasting, when he was rescued by friendly savages, who 
paddled across the stream to save him. Our young- 
ling pointed out a very respectable-looking stone house 
as having been " built by the Indians " about those 
times. Guides have queer notions occasionally. 



64 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

I was at Niagara just wlien Dr. Rae arrived there 
with his companions and dogs and things from his 
Arctic search after the lost navigator. 
* " Who are those ? " I said to my conductor. 

" Them ? " he answered. " Them's the men that's 
been out West, out to Michig'n, aft' Sir Ben Frank- 
linr 

Of the other sights of Harrisburg the Brant House 
or Hotel, or whatever it is called, seems most worth 
notice. J.t'^fagade is imposing, with a row of stately- 
columns, high above which a broad sign impends, like 
a crag over the brow of a lofty precipice. The lower 
floor only appeared to be open to the public. Its tes- 
sellated pavement and ample courts suggested the idea 
of a temple where great multitudes might kneel un- 
crowded at their devotions ; but from appearances 
about the place where the altar should be, I judged, 
that, if one asked the officiating priest for the cup 
which cheers and likewise inebriates, his prayer would 
not be unanswered. The edifice recalled to me a sim- 
ilar phenomenon I had once looked upon, — the fa- 
mous Caffe Pedrocchi at Padua. It was the same 
thing in Italy and America : a rich man builds him- 
self a mausoleum, and calls it a place of entertainment. 
The fragrance of innumerable libations and the smoke 
of incense-breathing cigars and pipes shall ascend day 
and night through the arches of his funereal monu- 
ment. What are the poor dips which flare and flicker 
on the crowns of spikes that stand at the corners of 
St. Genevieve's filigree-cased sarcophagus to this per- 
petual offering of sacrifice ? 

Ten o'clock in the evening was approaching. The 
telegraph office would presently close, and as yet there 
were no tidings from Hagerstown. Let us step over 
and see for ourselves. A message ! A message I 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 65 

" Captain H. still here leaves seven to-morrow for 
Harrishurg Penna Is doing well 

Mrs HK ." 

A note from Dr. Cuyler to the same effect came 
soon afterwards to the hotel. 

We shall sleep well to-night ; but let us sit awhile 
with nubif erous, or, if we may coin a word, nephelig- 
enous accompaniment, such as shall gently narcotize 
the over-wearied brain and fold its convolutions for 
slumber like the leaves of a lily at nightfall. For now 
the over-tense nerves are all unstraining themselves, 
and a buzz, like that which comes over one who stops 
after being long jolted upon an uneasy pavement, 
makes the whole frame alive with a luxurious languid 
sense of all its inmost fibres. Our cheerfulness ran 
over, and the mild, pensive clerk was so magnetized 
by it that he came and sat down with us. He pres- 
ently confided to me, with infinite naivetS and ingen- 
uousness, that, judging from my personal appearance, 
he should not have thought me the writer that he in 
his generosity reckoned me to be. His conception, so 
far as I could reach it, involved a huge, uplifted fore- 
head, embossed with protuberant organs of the intel- 
lectual faculties, such as all writers are supposed to 
possess in abounding measure. While I fell short of 
his ideal in this respect, he was pleased to say that he 
found me by no means the remote and inaccessible 
personage he had imagined, and that I had nothing of 
the dandy about me, which last compliment I had a 
modest consciousness of most abundantly deserving. 

Sweet slumbers brought us to the morning of Thurs- 
day. The train from Hagerstown was due at 11.15 
Ao M. We took another ride behind the codling, who 



66 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

showed us the sights of yesterday over again. Being 
in a gracious mood of mind, I enlarged on the vary- 
ing aspects of the town-pumps and other striking ob- 
jects which we had once inspected, as seen by the dif- 
ferent lights of evening and morning. After this, we 
visited the school-house hospital. A fine young fellow, 
whose arm had been shattered, was just falling into the 
spasms of lock-jaw. The beads of sweat stood large 
and round on his flushed and contracted features. He 
was under the effect of opiates, — why not (if his case 
was desperate, as it seemed to be considered) stop his 
sufferings with chloroform ? It was suggested that it 
might shorten life. " What then ? " I said. " Are a 
dozen additional spasms worth living for? " 

The time approached for the train to arrive from 
Hagerstown, and we went to the station. I was struck, 
while waiting there, with what seemed to me a great 
want of care for the safety of the people standing 
round. Just after my companion and myself had stepped 
off the track, I noticed a car coming quietly along 
at a walk, as one may say, without engine, without vis- 
ible conductor, without any person heralding its ap- 
proach, so silently, so insidiously, that I could not help 
thinking how very near it came to flattening out me 
and my match-box worse than the Ravel pantomimist 
and his snuff-box were flattened out in the play. The 
train was late, — fifteen minutes, half an hour late, — 
and I began to get nervous, lest something had hap- 
pened. While I was looking for it, out started a 
freight-train, as if on purpose to meet the cars I was 
expecting, for a grand smash-up. I shivered at the 
thought, and asked an em'ploye of the road, with whom 
I had formed an acquaintance a few minutes old, why 
there should not be a collision of the expected trair 



MY HUNT AFTER THE "CAPTAIN." 67 

with this which was just going out. He smiled an of- 
ficial smile, and answered that they arranged to pre- 
vent that, or words to that effect. 

Twenty-four hours had not passed from that moment 
when a collision did occur, just out of the city, where 
I feared it, by which at least eleven persons were 
killed, and from forty to sixty more were maimed and 
crippled ! 

To-day there was the delay spoken of, but nothing 
worse. The expected train came in so quietly that I 
was almost startled to see it on the track. Let us walk 
calmly through the cars, and look around us. 

In the first car, on the fourth seat to the right, I 
saw my Captain ; there saw I him, even my first-born, 
whom I had sought through many cities. 

" How are you. Boy ? " 

" How are you, Dad ? " 

Such are the proprieties of life, as they are observed 
among us Anglo-Saxons of the nineteenth century, 
decently disguising those natural impulses that made 
Joseph, the Prime Minister of Egypt, weep aloud so 
that the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard, — 
nay, which had once overcome his shaggy old uncle 
Esau so entirely that he fell on his brother's neck and 
cried like a baby in the presence of all the women. 
But the hidden cisterns of the soul may be filling fast 
with sweet tears, while the windows through which it 
looks are undimmed by a drop or a film of moisture. 

These are times in which we cannot live solely for 
selfish joys or griefs. I had not let fall the hand I 
held, when a sad, calm voice addressed me by name- 
I fear that at the moment I was too much absorbed in 
my own feelings ; for certainly at any other time I 



68 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

should have yielded myself without stint to the sym- 
pathy which this meeting might well call forth. 

" You remember my son, Cortland Saunders, whom 
I brought to see you once in Boston ? " 

" I do remember him well." 

" He was killed on Monday, at Shepherdstown. I 
am carrying his body back with me on this train. He 
was my only child. If you could come to my house, 
• — I can hardly call it my home now, — it would be a 
pleasure to me." 

This young man, belonging in Philadelphia, was 
the author of a " New System of Latin Paradigms," 
a work showing extraordinary scholarship and capac- 
ity. It was this book which first made me acquainted 
with him, and I kept him in my memory, for there 
was genius in the youth. Some time afterwards he 
came to me with a modest request to be introduced to 
President Felton, and one or two others, who would 
aid him in a course of independent study he was pro- 
posing to himself. I was most happy to smooth the 
way for him, and he came repeatedly after this to see 
me and express his satisfaction in the opportunities 
for study he enjoyed at Cambridge. He was a dark, 
still, slender person, always with a trance-like remote- 
ness, a mystic dreaminess of manner, such as I never 
saw in any other youth. Whether he heard with dif- 
ficulty, or whether his mind reacted slowly on an alien 
thought, I could not say ; but his answer would often 
be behind time, and then a vague, sweet smile, or a 
few words spoken under his breath, as if he had been 
trained in sick men's chambers. Foi; such a young 
man, seemingly destined for the inner life of contem- 
plation, to be a soldier seemed almost unnatural. Yet 
he spoke to me of his intention to offer himself to his 



MY HUNT AFTER " THE CAPTAIN." 69 

country, and his blood muKst now be reckoned among 
tbe precious sacrifices whicli will make her soil sacred 
forever. Had he lived, I doubt not that he would 
have redeemed the rare promise of his earlier years. 
He has done better, for he has died that unborn gen- 
erations may attain the hopes held out to our nation 
and to mankind. 

So, then, I had been within ten miles of the place 
where my wounded soldier was lying, and then calmly 
turned my back upon him to come once more round 
by a journey of three or four hundred miles to the 
same region I had left I No mysterious attraction 
warned me that the heart warm with the same blood 
as mine was throbbing so near my own. I thought of 
that lovely, tender passage where Gabriel glides un- 
consciously by Evangeline upon the great river. Ah, 
me I if that railroad crash had been a few hours ear- 
lier, we two should never have met again, after coming 
so close to each other ! 

The source of my repeated disappointments was 
soon made clear enough. The Captain had gone to 
Hagerstown, intending to take the cars at once for 
Philadelphia, as his three friends actually did, and as 
I took it for granted he certainly would. But as he 
walked languidly along, some ladies saw him across 
the street, and seeing, were moved with pity, and pity- 
ing, spoke such soft words that he was tempted to ac- 
cept their invitation and rest awhile beneath their hos- 
pitable roof. The mansion was old, as the dwellings 
of gentlefolks should be ; the ladies were some of 
them young, and all were full of kindness ; there were 
gentle cares, and unasked luxuries, and pleasant talk, 
and music-sprinklings from the piano, with a sweet 
voice to keep them company, — and all this after the 



70 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

swamps of the CHckahominy, the mud and flies of 
Harrison's Landing, the dragging marches, the des- 
perate battles, the fretting wound, the jolting ambu- 
lance, the log-house, and the rickety milk - cart ! 
Thanks, uncounted thanks to the angelic ladies whose 
charming attentions detained him from Saturday to 
Thursday, to his great advantage and my infinite be- 
wilderment ! As for his wound, how could it do oth- 
erwise than well under such hands ? The bullet had 
gone smoothly through, dodging everything but a few 
nervous branches, which would come right in time and 
leave him as well as ever. 

At ten that evening we were in Philadelphia, the 
Captain at the house of the friends so often referred 
to, and I the guest of Charley, my kind companion. 
The Quaker element gives an irresistible attraction to 
these benignant Philadelphia households. Many things 
reminded me that I was no longer in the land of the 
Pilgrims. On the table were Kool Slaa and Schmeer 
KasG^ but the good grandmother who dispensed with 
such quiet, simple grace these and more familiar deli- 
cacies was literally ignorant of Baked Beans^ and 
asked if it was the Lima bean which was employed in 
that marvellous dish of animalized legimiinous farina ! 

Charley was pleased with my comparing the face of 
the small Ethiop known to his household as " Tines " 
to a huckleberry with features. He also approved my 
parallel between a certain German blonde young 
maiden whom we passed in the street and the " Morris 
White " peach. But he was so good-humored at times, 
that, if one scratched a lucifer, he accepted it as an il- 
lumination. 

A day in Philadelphia left a very agreeable impres- 
sion of the outside of that great city, which has en- 



MY HUNT AFTEE "THE CAPTAIN-" 71 

deared itself so much of late to all the country by its 
most noble and generous care of our soldiers. Meas- 
ured by its sovereign hotel, the Continental, it would 
stand at the head of our economic civilization. It pro- 
vides for the comforts and conveniences, and many of 
the elegances of life, more satisfactorily than any 
American city, perhaps than any other city anywhere. 
Many of its characteristics are accounted for to some 
extent by its geographical position. It is the great 
neutral centre of the Continent, where the fiery enthu- 
siasms of the South and the keen fanaticisms of the 
North meet at their outer limits, and result in a com- 
pound which neither turns litmus red nor turmeric 
brown. It lives largely on its traditions, of which, 
leaving out Franklin and Independence Hall, the most 
imposing must be considered its famous water-works. 
In my younger days I visited Fairmount, and it was 
with a pious reverence that I renewed my pilgrimage 
to that perennial fountain. Its watery ventricles were 
throbbing with the same systole and diastole as when, 
the blood of twenty years bounding in my own heart, 
I looked upon their giant mechanism. But in the 
place of " Pratt's Garden " was an open park, and the 
old house where Robert Morris held his court in a 
former generation was changing to a public restau- 
rant. A suspension bridge cobwebbed itseK across the 
Schuylkill where that audacious arch used to leap the 
river at a single bound, — an arch of greater span, as 
they loved to tell us, than was ever before constructed. 
The Upper Ferry Bridge was to the Schuylkill what 
the Colossus was to the harbor of Rhodes. It had an 
air of dash about it which went far towards redeeming 
the dead level of respectable average which flattens 
the physiognomy of the rectangular city. Philadel- 



72 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

pMa will never be herself again until another Robert 
Mills and another Lewis Wernwag have shaped her a 
new palladium. She must leap the Schuylkill again, 
or old men will sadly shake their heads, like the Jews 
at the sight of the second temple, remembering the 
glories of that which it replaced. 

There are times when Ethiopian minstrelsy can 
amuse, if it does not charm, a weary soul, and such a 
vacant hour there was on this same Friday evening. 
The " opera-house " was spacious and admirably ven- 
tilated. As I was listening to the merriment of the 
sooty buffoons, I happened to cast my eyes up to the 
ceiling, and through an open semicircular window a 
bright solitary star looked me calmly in the eyes. It 
was a strange intrusion of the vast eternities beckon- 
ing from the infinite spaces. I called the attention of 
one of my neighbors to it, but " Bones " was irresisti- 
bly droll, and Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or whatever the 
blazing luminary may have been, with all his revolving 
worlds, sailed uncared-for down the firmament. 

On Saturday morning we took up our line of march 
for New York. Mr. Felton, President of the Phila- 
delphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, had al- 
ready called upon me, with a benevolent and sagacious 
look on his face which implied that he knew how to do 
me a service and meant to do it. Sure enough, when 
we got to the depot, we foimd a couch spread for the 
Captain, and both of us were passed on to New York 
with no visits, but those of civility, from the conduc- 
tor. The best thing I saw on the route was a rustic 
fence, near Elizabethtown, I think, but I am not quite 
sure. There was more genius in it than in any struc- 
ture of the kind I have ever seen, — each length being 
of a special pattern, ramified, reticulated, contorted, as 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 73 

the limbs of the trees had grown. I trust some friend 
will photograph or stereograph tliis fence for me, to 
go with the view of the spires of Frederick, already 
referred to, as mementos of my journey. 

I had come to feeling that I knew most of the re- 
spectably dressed people whom I met in the cars, and 
had been in contact with them at some time or other. 
Three or four ladies and gentlemen were near us, 
forming a group by themselves. Presently one ad- 
dressed me by name, and, on inquiry, I found him to 
be the gentleman who was with me in the pulpit as 
Orator on the occasion of another Phi Beta Kappa 
poem, one delivered at New Haven. The party were 
very courteous and friendly, and contributed in vari- 
ous ways to our comfort. 

It sometimes seems to me as if there were only 
about a thousand peoj)le in the world, who keep going 
round and round behind the scenes and then before 
them, like the " army " in a beggarly stage-show. Sup- 
pose that I should really wish, some time or other, to 
get away from this everlasting circle of revolving su- 
pernumeraries, where should I buy a ticket the like of 
which was not in some of their pockets, or find a seat 
to which some one of them was not a neighbor. 

A little less than a year before, after the Ball's 
Bluff accident, the Captain, then the Lieutenant, and 
myself had reposed for a night on our homeward jour- 
ney at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where we were lodged 
on the ground-floor, and fared sumptuously. We 
were not so peculiarly fortunate this time, the house 
being really very full. Farther from the flowers and 
nearer to the stars, — to reach the neighborhood of 
which last the jyer ardua of three or four flights of 
stairs was formidable for any mortal, wounded or well. 



74 PAGES TEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

The "vertical railway" settled that for us, however. 
It is a giant corkscrew forever pulling a mammoth 
cork, which, by some divine judgment, is no sooner 
drawn than it is replaced in its position. This as- 
cending and descending stopper is hollow, carpeted, 
with cushioned seats, and is watched over by two con- 
demned souls, called conductors, one of whom is said 
to be named Ixion, and the other Sisyphus. 

I love New York, because, as in Paris, everybody 
that lives in it feels that it is his property, — at least, as 
much as it is anybody's. My Broadway, in particu- 
lar, I love almost as I used to love my Boulevards. I 
went, therefore, with peculiar interest, on the day that 
we rested at our grand hotel, to visit some new pleas- 
ure-grounds the citizens had been arranging for us, 
and which I had not yet seen. The Central Park is 
an expanse of wild country, well crumpled so as to 
form ridges which will give views and hollows that 
will hold water. The hips and elbows and other bones 
of Nature stick out here and there in the shape of 
rocks which give character to the scenery, and an un- 
changeable, unpurchasable look to a landscape that 
without them would have been in danger of being fat- 
tened by art and money out of all its native features. 
The roads were fine, the sheets of water beautiful, the 
bridges handsome, the swans elegant in their deport- 
ment, the grass green and as short as a fast horse's 
winter coat. I could not learn whether it was kept so 
by clipping or singeing. I was delighted with my 
new property, — but it cost me four dollars to get 
there, so far was it beyond the Pillars of Hercules of 
the fashionable quarter. What it will be by and by de- 
pends on circumstances; but at present it is as much 
central to New York as Brookline is central to Boston. 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN." 75 

The question is not between Mr. Olmsted's admirably 
arranged, but remote pleasure-ground and our Common, 
with its batrachian pool, but between his .fecentric 
Park and our finest suburban scenery, between its ar- 
tificial reservoirs and the broad natural sheet of Ja- 
maica Pond. I say this not invidiously, but in justice 
to the beauties which surround our own metropolis. 
To compare the situations of any dwellings in either 
of the great cities with those which look upon the 
Common, the Public Garden, the waters of the Back 
Bay, would be to take an unfair advantage of Fifth 
Avenue and Walnut Street. St. Botolph's daughter 
dresses in plainer clothes than her more stately sisters, 
but she wears an emerald on her right hand and a 
diamond on her left that Cybele herself need not be 
ashamed of. 

On Monday morning, the twenty-ninth of Septem- 
ber, we took the cars for home. Vacant lots, with 
Irish and pigs ; vegetable-gardens ; straggling houses ; 
the high bridge ; villages, not enchanting ; then Stam- 
ford : then Noewalk. Here, on the sixth of May, 
1853, 1 passed close on the heels of the great disaster. 
But that my lids were hea\y on that morning, my 
readers would probably have had no further trouble 
with me. Two of my friends saw the car in which they 
rode break in the middle and leave them hanging over 
the abyss. From Norwalk to Boston, that day's jour- 
ney of two hundred miles was a long funeral procession. 

Bridgeport, waiting for Iranistan to rise from its 
ashes with all its phoenix-egg domes, — bubbles of 
wealth that broke, ready to be blown again, iridescent 
as ever, which is pleasant, for the world likes cheerful 
Mr. Barnum's success ; New Haven, girt with flat 
marshes that look like monstrous billiard-tables, with 



76 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

hay-cocks lying about for balls, — romantic with West 
Rock and its legends, — cursed with a detestable 
depot, whose niggardly arrangements crowd the track 
so murderously close to the wall that the peine forte 
et dure must be the frequent penalty of an innocent 
walk on its platform, — with its neat carriages, metro- 
politan hotels, precious old college-dormitories, its 
vistas of elms and its dishevelled weeping-willows ; 
Hartford, substantial, well-bridged, many - steepled 
city, — every conical spire an extinguisher of some 
nineteenth-century heresy ; so onward, by and across 
the broad, shallow Connecticut, — dull red road and 
dark river woven in like warp and woof by the shuttle 
of the darting engine ; then Springfield, the wide- 
meadowed, well-feeding, horse-loving, hot-summered, 
giant-treed town, — city among villages, village among 
cities ; Worcester, with its Daedalian labyrinth of 
crossing railroad-bars, where the snorting Minotaurs, 
breathing fire and smoke and hot vapors, are stabled 
in their dens ; Framingham, fair cup-bearer, leaf -cinc- 
tured Hebe of the deep-bosomed Queen sitting by the 
sea-side on the throne of the Six Nations. And now 
I begin to know the road, not by towns, but by 
single dwellings ; not by miles, but by rods. The 
poles of the great magnet that draws in all the iron 
tracks through the grooves of all the mountains must 
be near at hand, for here are crossings, and sudden 
stops, and screams of alarmed engines heard all 
around. The tall granite obelisk comes into view far 
away on the left, its bevelled cap-stone sharp against 
the sky ; the lofty chimneys of Charlestown and East 
Cambridge flaunt their smoky banners up in the thin 
air ; and now one fair bosom of the three-hilled city, 
with its dome-crowned summit, reveals itseK, as when 



MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN.'* 77 

* 

many-breasted Ephesian Artemis appeared with half- 
open chlamys before her worshippers. 

Fling open the window-blinds of the chamber that 
looks out on the waters and towards the western smi ! 
Let the joyous light shine in upon the pictures that 
hang upon its walls and the shelves thick-set with the 
names of poets and philosophers and sacred teachers, 
in whose pages our boys learn that life is noble only 
when it is held cheap by the side of honor and of 
duty. Lay him in his own bed, and let Lim sleep off 
his aches and weariness. So comes down another 
night over this household, unbroken by any messenger 
of evil tidings, — a night of peaceful rest and grate- 
ful thoughts ; for this our son and brother was dead 
and is alive again, and was lost and is found. 



m. 

THE I^s^EVlTABLE TRIAL." 

It is our first impulse, upon this returning day of 
our nation's birth, to recall whatever is happiest and 
noblest in our past history, and to join our voices in 
celebrating the statesmen and the heroes, the men of 
thought and the men of action, to whom that history 
owes its existence. In other years this pleasing office 
may have been all that was required of the holiday 
speaker. But to-day, when the very life of the nation 
is threatened, when clouds are thick about us, and 
men's hearts are throbbing with passion, or failing 
with fear, it is the living question of the hour, and not 
the dead story of the past, which forces itself into all 
minds, and will find unrebuked debate in all assem- 
blies. 

In periods of disturbance like the present, many 
persons who sincerely love their country and mean to 
do their duty to her disappoint the hopes and expecta- 
tions of those who are actively working in her cause. 
They seem to have lost whatever moral force they may 
have once possessed, and to go drifting about from one 
profitless discontent to another, at a time when every 
citizen is called upon for cheerful, ready service. It 
is because their minds are bewildered, and they are no 
longer truly themselves. Show them the path of duty, 

" An Oration delivered before the City Authorities of Boston, 
on the 4th of July, 1863. 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 79 

inspire them with hope for the future, lead them up- 
wards from the turbid stream of events to the bright, 
transhicent springs of eternal principles, strengthen 
their trust in humanity and their faith in God, and 
you may yet restore them to their manhood and their 
country. 

At all times, and especially on this anniversary 
of glorious recollections and kindly enthusiasms, we 
should try to judge the weak and wavering souls of 
our brothers fairly and generously. The conditions in 
which our vast community of peace-loving citizens find 
themselves are new and unprovided for. Our quiet 
burghers and farmers are in the position of river-boats 
blown from their moorings out upon a vast ocean, 
w:here such a typhoon is raging as no mariner who 
sails its waters ever before looked upon. If their be- 
liefs change with the veering of the blast, if their trust 
in their fellow-men, and in the course of Divine Prov- 
idence, seems well-nigh shipwrecked, we must remem- 
ber that they were taken unawares, and without the 
preparation which could fit them to struggle with these 
tempestuous elements. In times like these the faith 
is the man ; and they to whom it is given in larger 
measure owe a special duty to those who for want of it 
are faint at heart, uncertain in speech, feeble in effort, 
and purposeless in aim. 

Assuming without argument a few simple proposi- 
tions, — that self-government is the natural condition 
of an adult society, as distinguished from the imma- 
ture state, in which the temporary arrangements of 
monarchy and oligarchy are tolerated as conveniences ; 
that the end of all social compacts is, or ought to be, 
to give every child born into the world the fairest 
chance to make the most and the best of itself that 



80 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

laws can give it ; that Liberty, the one of the two 
claimants who swears that her babe shall not be split 
in halves and divided between them, is the true mother 
of this blessed Union ; that the contest in which we 
are engaged is one of principles overlaid by circum- 
stances ; that the longer we fight, and the more we 
study the movements of events and ideas, the more 
clearly we find the moral nature of the cause at issue 
emerging in the field and in the study ; that all honest 
persons with average natural sensibility, with respecta- 
ble understanding, educated in the school of northern 
teaching, will have eventually to range themselves in 
the armed or unarmed host which fights or pleads for 
freedom, as against every form of tyranny ; if not in 
the front rank now, then in the rear rank by and by ; 
— assuming these propositions, as many, perhaps most 
of us, are ready to do, and believing that the more 
they are debated before the public the more they will 
gain converts, we owe it to the timid and the doubting 
to keep the great questions of the time in unceasing 
and untiring agitation. They must be discussed, in 
all ways consistent with the public welfare, by differ- 
ent classes of thinkers; by priests and laymen ; by 
statesmen and simple voters ; by moralists and law- 
yers; by men of science and uneducated hand-labor- 
ers ; by men of facts and figures, and by men of theo- 
ries and aspirations ; in the abstract and in the 
concrete ; discussed and rediscussed every month, 
every week, every day, and almost every hour, as the 
telegraph tells us of some new upheaval or subsidence 
of the rocky base of our political order. 

Such discussions may not be necessary to strengthen 
the convictions of the great body of loyal citizens. 
They may do nothing toward changing the views of 



THE INEVITABLE TKIAL. 81 

those, if such there be, as some profess to believe, who 
follow politics as a trade. They may have no hold 
upon that class of persons who are defective in moral 
sensibility, just as other persons are wanting in an ear 
for music. But for the honest, vacillating minds, the 
tender consciences supported by the tremulous knees 
of an infirm intelligence, the timid compromisers who 
are always trying to curve the straight lines and round 
the sharp angles of eternal law, the continual debate 
of these living questions is the one offered means of 
grace and hope of earthly redemption. And thus a 
true, unhesitating patriot may be willing to listen with 
patience to arguments which he does not need, to ap- 
peals which have no special significance for him, in 
the hope that some less clear in mind or less courage- 
ous in temper may profit by them. 

As we look at the condition in which we find our- 
selves on this fourth day of July, 1863, at the begin- 
ning of the Eighty-eighth Year of American Indepen- 
dence, we may well ask ourselves what right we have 
to indulge in public rejoicings. If the war in which 
we are engaged is an accidental one, which might have 
been avoided but for our fault ; if it is for any ambi- 
tious or unworthy purpose on our part ; if it is hope- 
less, and we are madly persisting in it ; if it is our 
duty and in our power to make a safe and honorable 
peace, and we refuse to do it ; if our free institutions 
are in danger of becoming subverted, and giving place 
to an irresponsible t}T?anny ; if we are moving in the 
narrow circles which are to ingulf us in national ruin, 
— then we had better sing a dirge, and leave this idle 
assemblage, and hush the noisy cannon which are re- 
verberating through the air, and tear down the scaf- 



82 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

folds wMcli are soon to blaze witli fiery symbols ; for 
it is mourning and not joy that should cover the land; 
there should be silence, and not the echo of noisy glad- 
ness, in our streets ; and the emblems with which we 
tell our nation's story and prefigure its future should 
be traced, not in fire, but in ashes. 

If, on the other hand, this war is no accident, but 
an inevitable result of long incubating causes ; inevi- 
table as the cataclysms that swept away the monstrous 
births of primeval nature ; if it is for no mean, un- 
worthy end, but for national life, for liberty every- 
where, for humanity, for the kingdom of God on 
earth ; if it is not hopeless, but only growing to such 
dimensions that the world shall remember the final 
triumph of right throughout all time ; if there is no 
safe and honorable peace for us but a peace proclaimed 
from the capital of every revolted province in the 
name of the sacred, inviolable Union ; if the fear of 
tyranny is a phantasm, conjured up by the imagina- 
tion of the weak, acted on by the craft of the cun- 
ning ; if so far from circling inward to the gulf of our 
perdition, the movement of past years is reversed, and 
every revolution carries us farther and farther from 
the centre of the vortex, until, by God's blessing, we 
shall soon find ourselves freed from the outermost coil 
of the accursed spiral ; if all these things are true ; 
if we may hope to make them seem true, or even prob- 
able, to the doubting soul, in an hour's discourse, — 
then we may join without madness in the day's exult- 
ant festivities ; the bells may ring, the cannon may 
roar, the incense of our harmless saltpetre fill the air, 
and the children who are to inherit the fruit of these 
toiling, agonizing years, go about unblamed, making 
day and night vocal with their jubilant patriotism. 



THE INEVITABLE TEIAL. 83 

The struggle in which we are engaged was inevita- 
ble ; it might have come a little sooner, or a little 
later, but it must have come. The disease of the na- 
tion was organic, and not functional, and the rough 
chirurgery of war was its only remedy. 

In opposition to this view, there are many languid 
thinkers who lapse into a forlorn belief that if this or 
that man had never lived, or if this or that other man 
had not ceased to live, the country might have gone 
on in peace and prosperity, until its felicity merged in 
the glories of the millennium. If Mr. Calhoun had 
never proclaimed his heresies ; if Mr. Garrison had 
never published his paper ; if Mr. Phillips, the Cas- 
sandra in masculine shape of our long prosperous 
Ilium, had never uttered his melodious prophecies ; if 
the silver tones of Mr. Clay had still sounded in the 
senate-chamber to smooth the billows of contention ; 
if the Olympian brow of Daniel Webster had been 
lifted from the dust to fix its awful frown on the 
darkening scowl of rebellion, — we might have been 
spared this dread season of convulsion. All this is 
but simple Martha's faith, without the reason she 
could have given : "If Thou hadst been here, my 
brother had not died." 

They little know the tidal movements of national 
thought and feeling, who believe that they depend for 
existence on a few swimmers who ride their waves. 
It is not Leviathan that leads the ocean from continent 
to continent, but the ocean which bears his mighty 
bulk as it wafts its own bubbles. If this is true of 
all the narrower manifestations of human progress, 
how much more must it be true of those broad move- 
ments in the intellectual and spiritual domain which 
interest all mankind ? But in the more limited ranges 



84 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

referred to, no fact is more familiar than that there is 
a simultaneous impulse acting on many individual 
minds at once, so that genius comes in clusters, and 
shines rarely as a single star. You may trace a com- 
mon motive and force in the pyramid-builders of the 
earliest recorded antiquity, in the evolution of Greek 
architecture, and in the sudden springing up of those 
wondrous cathedrals of the twelfth and following cen- 
turies, growing out of the soil with stem and bud and 
blossom, like flowers of stone whose seeds might well 
have been the flaming aerolites cast over the battle- 
ments of heaven. You may see the same law showing 
itself in the brief periods of glory which make the 
names of Pericles and Augustus illustrious with re- 
flected splendors ; in the painters, the sculptors, the 
scholars of " Leo's golden days " ; in the authors of 
the Elizabethan time ; in the poets of the first part of 
this century following that dreary period, suffering 
alike from the silence of Cowper and the song of 
Hayley. You may accept the fact as natural, that 
Zwingli and Luther, without knowing each other, 
preached the same reformed gospel ; that Newton, and 
Hooke, and Halley, and Wren arrived independently 
of each other at the great law of the diminution of 
gravity with the square of the distance ; that Lever- 
rier and Adams felt their hands meeting, as it were, 
as they stretched them into the outer darkness beyond 
the orbit of Uranus, in search of the dim, unseen 
planet ; that Fulton and Bell, that Wheatstone and 
Morse, that Daguerre and Niepce, were moving almost 
simultaneously in parallel paths to the same end. 
You see why Patrick Henry, in Richmond, and Sam- 
uel Adams, in Boston, were startling the crown offi- 
cials with the same accents of liberty, and why the 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 85 

Mecklenburg Resolutions had tlie very ring of the 
Protest of the Province of Massachusetts. This law 
of simultaneous intellectual movement, recognized by 
all thinkers, expatiated upon by Lord Macaulay and 
by Mr. Herbert Spencer among recent writers, is em- 
inently applicable to that change of thought and feel- 
ing which necessarily led to the present conflict. 

The antagonism of the two sections of the Union 
was not the work of this or that enthusiast or fanatic. 
It was the consequence of a movement in mass of two 
different forms of civilization in different directions, 
and the men to whom it was attributed were only those 
who represented it most completely, or who talked 
longest and loudest about it. Long before the accents 
of those famous statesmen referred to ever resounded 
in the halls of the Capitol, long before the " Liberator " 
opened its batteries, the controversy now working it- 
self out by trial of battle was foreseen and predicted. 
Washington warned his countrymen of the danger of 
sectional divisions, well knowing the line of cleavage 
that ran through the seemingly solid fabric. Jeffer- 
son foreshadowed the judgment to fall upon the land 
for its sins against a just God. Andrew Jackson an- 
nounced a quarter of a century beforehand that the next 
pretext of revolution would be slavery. De Tocque- 
ville recognized with that penetrating insight which 
analyzed our institutions and conditions so keenly, 
that the Union was to be endangered by slavery, not 
through its interests, but through the change of char- 
acter it was bringing about in the people of the two 
sections, the same fatal change which George Mason, 
more than half a century before, had declared to be 
the most pernicious effect of the system, adding the 
solemn warning, now fearfully justifying itself in the 



86 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

sight of his descendants, that " by an inevitable chain 
of causes and effects, Providence punishes national 
sins by national calamities." The Virginian romancer 
pictured the far-off scenes of the conflict which he saw 
approaching as the prophets of Israel painted the com- 
ing woes of Jerusalem, and the strong iconoclast of 
Boston announced the very year when the curtain 
should rise on the yet unopened drama. 

The wise men of the past, and the shrewd men of 
our own time, who warned us of the calamities in store 
for our nation, never doubted what was the cause 
which was to produce first alienation and finally rup- 
ture. The descendants of the men " daily exercised 
in tyranny," the " petty tyrants," as their own leading 
statesmen called them long ago, came at length to love 
the institution which their fathers had condemned 
while they tolerated. It is the fearful realization of 
that vision of the poet where the lost angels snuff up 
with eager nostrils the sulphurous emanations of the 
bottomless abyss, — so have their natures become 
changed by long breathing the atmosphere of the realm 
of darkness. 

At last, in the fulness of time, the fruits of sin 
ripened in a sudden harvest of crime. Violence 
stalked into the senate-chamber, theft and perjury 
wound their way into the cabinet, and, finally, openly 
organized conspiracy, with force and arms, made bur- 
glarious entrance into a chief stronghold of the Union. 
That the principle which underlay these acts of fraud 
and violence should be irrevocably recorded with every 
needed sanction, it pleased God to select a chief ruler 
of the false government to be its Messiah to the listen- 
ing world. As with Pharaoh, the Lord hardened his 
heart, while he opened his mouth, as of old he opened 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 87 

that of the unwise animal ridden by cursing Balaam. 
Then spake Mr. " Vice-President " Stephens those 
memorable words which fixed forever the theory of the 
new social order. He first lifted a degraded barbarism 
to the dignity of a philosophic system. He first pro- 
claimed the gospel of eternal tyranny as the new reve- 
lation which Providence had reserA^ed for the western 
Palestine. Hear, O heavens ! and give ear, O earth ! 
The corner-stone of the new-born dispensation is the 
recognized inequality of races; not that the strong 
may protect the weak, as men protect women and chil- 
dren, but that the strong may claim the authority of 
Nature and of God to buy, to sell, to scourge, to hunt, 
to cheat out of the reward of his labor, to keep in 
perpetual ignorance, to blast with hereditary curses 
throughout all time, the bronzed foundling of the New 
World, upon whose darkness has dawned the star of 
the occidental Bethlehem ! 

After two years of war have consolidated the opin- 
ion of the Slave States, we read in the " Richmond 
Examiner " : " The establishment of the Confederacy 
is verily a distinct reaction against the whole course of 
the mistaken civilization of the age. For ' Liberty, 
Equality, Fraternity,' we have deliberately substituted 
Slavery, Subordination, and Government." 

A simple diagram, within the reach of all, shows 
how idle it is to look for any other cause than slavery 
as having any material agency in dividing the country. 
Match the two broken pieces of the Union, and you 
will find the fissure that separates them zigzagging it- 
self half across the continent like an isothermal line, 
shooting its splintery projections, and opening its re- 
entering angles, not merely according to the limitations 
of particular States, but as a county or other limited 



88 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

section of ground belongs to freedom or to slavery. 
Add to this the official statement made in 1862, that 
" there is not one regiment or battalion, or even com- 
pany of men, which was organized in or derived from 
the Free States or Territories, anywhere, against the 
Union " ; throw in gratuitously Mr. Stephens's explicit 
declaration in the speech referred to, and we will con- 
sider the evidence closed for the present on this count 
of the indictment. 

In the face of these predictions, these declarations, 
this line of fracture, this precise statement, testimony 
from so many sources, extending through several gen- 
erations, as to the necessary effect of slavery, a priori^ 
and its actual influence as shown by the facts, few will 
suppose that anything we could have done would have 
stayed its course or prevented it from working out its 
legitimate effects on the white subjects of its corrupt- 
ing dominion. Northern acquiescence or even sympa- 
thy may have sometimes helped to make it sit more 
easily on the consciences of its supporters. Many 
profess to think that Northern fanaticism, as they call 
it, acted like a mordant in fixing the black dye of 
slavery in regions which woidd but for that have 
washed themselves free of its stain in tears of peni- 
tence. It is a delusion and a snare to trust in any 
such false and flimsy reasons where there is enough 
and more than enough in the institution itself to ac- 
count for its growth. Slavery gratifies at once the 
love of power, the love of money, and the love of 
ease ; it finds a victim for anger who cannot smite 
back his oppressor ; and it offers to all, without meas- 
ure, the seductive privileges which the Mormon gospel 
reserves for the true believers on earth, and the Bible 
of Mahomet only dares promise to the saints in heaven. 



THE INEVITABLE TEIAL. 89 

Still it is common, common even to vulgarism, to 
hear the remark that the same gallows-tree ought to 
bear as its fruit the arch-traitor and the leading cham- 
pion of aggressive liberty. The mob of Jerusalem 
was not satisfied with its two crucified thieves ; it must 
have a cross also for the reforming Galilean, who in- 
terfered so rudely with its conservative traditions I It 
is asserted that the fault was quite as much on our 
side as on the other ; that our agitators and abolishers 
kindled the flame for which the combustibles were all 
ready on the other side of the border. If these men 
could have been silenced, our brothers had not died. 

Who are the persons that use this argument ? They 
are the very ones who are at the present moment most 
zealous in maintaining the right of free discussion. 
At a time when every power the nation can summon 
is needed to ward off the blows aimed at its life, and 
turn their force upon its foes, — when a false traitor 
at home may lose us a battle by a word, and a lying 
newspaper may demoralize an army by its daily or 
weekly stillicidium of poison, they insist with loud 
acclaim upon the liberty of speech and of the press ; 
liberty, nay license, to deal with government, with 
leaders, with every measure, however urgent, in any 
terms they choose, to traduce the officer before his 
own soldiers, and assail the only men who have any 
claim at all to rule over the country, as the very ones 
who are least worthy to be obeyed. If these opposi- 
tion members of society are to have their way now, 
they cannot find fault with those persons who spoke 
their minds freely in the past on that great question 
which, as we have agreed, underlies all our present 
dissensions. 

It is easy to understand the bitterness which is often 



90 PAGES FROM AN OLD YOLUME OF LIFE. 

shown towards reformers. They are never general 
favorites. They are apt to interfere with vested rights 
and time-hallowed interests. They often wear an un- 
lovely, forbidding aspect. Their office corresponds to 
that of Nature's sanitary commission for the removal 
of material nuisances. It is not the butterfly, but the 
beetle, which she employs for this duty. It is not the 
bird of paradise and the nightingale, but the fowl of 
dark plumage and unmelodious voice, to which is in- 
trusted the sacred duty of eliminating the substances 
that infect the air. And the force of obvious analogy 
teaches us not to expect all the qualities which please 
the general taste in those whose instincts lead them to 
attack the moral nuisances which poison the atmos- 
phere of society. But whether they please us in all 
their aspects or not, is not the question. Like them 
or not, they must and will perform their office, and we 
cannot stop them. They may be unwise, violent, 
abusive, extravagant, impracticable, but they are 
alive, at any rate, and it is their business to remove 
abuses as soon as they are dead, and often to help 
them to die. To quarrel with them because they are 
beetles, and not butterflies, is natural, but far from 
profitable. They grow none the less vigorously for 
being trodden upon, like those tough weeds that love 
to nestle between the stones of court-yard pavements. 
If you strike at one of their heads with the bludgeon 
of the law, or of violence, it flies open like the seed- 
capsule of a snap-weed, and fills the whole region with 
seminal thoughts which will spring up in a crop just 
like the original martyr. They chased one of these en- 
thusiasts, who attacked slavery, from St. Louis, and 
shot him at Alton in 1837 ; and on the 23d of June 
just passed, the Grovernor of Missouri, chairman of the 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 91 

Committee on Emancipation, introduced to the Con- 
vention an Ordinance for the final extinction of slav- 
ery ! Tliey hunted another through the streets of a 
great Northern city in 1835 ; and within a few weeks 
a regiment of colored soldiers, many of them bearing 
the marks of the slave-driver's whip on their backs, 
marched out before a vast multitude tremulous with 
newly-stirred sympathies, through the streets of the 
same city, to fight our battles in the name of God and 
Liberty ! 

The same persons who abuse the reformers, and lay 
all our troubles at their door, are apt to be severe also 
on what they contemptuously emphasize as ••' sentiments " 
considered as motives of action. It is charitable to 
believe that they do not seriously contemplate or truly 
understand the meaning of the words they use, but 
rather play with them, as certain so-called " learned " 
quadrupeds play with the printed characters set before 
them. In all questions involving duty, we act from 
sentiments. Religion springs from them, the family 
order rests upon them, and in every community each 
act involving a relation between any two of its mem- 
bers implies the recognition or the denial of a senti- 
ment. It is true that men often forget them or act 
against their bidding in the keen competition of busi- 
ness and politics. But God has not left the hard in- 
tellect of man to work out its devices without the con- 
stant presence of beings with gentler and purer instincts. 
The breast of woman is the ever-rocking cradle of the 
pure and holy sentiments which will sooner or later 
steal their way into the mind of her sterner companion ; 
which will by and by emerge in the thoughts of the 
world's teachers, and at last thunder forth in the edicts 
of its law-givers and masters. Woman herself bor- 



92 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

rows half her tenderness from the sweet influences of 
maternity ; and childhood, that weeps at the story of 
suffering, that shudders at the picture of wrong, brings 
down its inspiration " from God, who is our home." 
To quarrel, then, with the class of minds that instinct- 
ively attack abuses, is not only profitless but senseless ; 
to sneer at the sentiments which are the springs of all 
just and virtuous actions, is merely a display of un- 
thinking levity, or of want of the natural sensibilities. 

With the hereditary character of the Southern peo- 
ple moving in one direction, and the awakened con- 
science of the North stirring in the other, the open 
conflict of opinion was inevitable, and equally inevitable 
its appearance in the field of national politics. For 
what is meant by self-government is, that a man shall 
make his convictions of what is right and expedient 
regulate the community so far as his fractional share 
of the government extends. If one has come to the 
conclusion, be it right or wrong, that any particular in- 
stitution or statute is a violation of the sovereign law 
of God, it is to be expected that he will choose to be 
represented by those who share his belief, and who will 
in their wider sphere do all they legitimately can to 
get rid of the wrong in which they find themselves and 
their constituents involved. To prevent opinion from 
organizing itself under political forms may be very de- 
sirable, but it is not according to the theory or practice 
of self-government. And if at last organized opinions 
become arrayed in hostile shape against each other, we 
shall find that a just war is only the last inevitable link 
in a chain of closely connected impulses of which the 
original source is in Him who gave to tender and hum- 
ble and uncorrupted souls the sense of 'right and 
wrong, which, after passing through various forms, has 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 93 

found its final expression in the use of material force. 
Behind the bayonet is the law-giver's statute, behind 
the statute the thinker's argument, behind the argu- 
ment is the tender conscientiousness of woman, — 
woman, the wife, the mother, — who looks upon the 
face of God himself reflected in the unsullied soul of 
infancy. " Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings 
hast thou ordained strength, because of thine ene- 
mies." 

The simplest course for the malecontent is to find 
fault with the order of Nature and the Being who es- 
tablished it. Unless the law of moral progress were 
changed, or the Governor of the Universe were de- 
throned, it would be impossible to prevent a great up- 
rising of the human conscience against a system, the 
legislation relating to which, in the words of so calm 
an observer as De Tocqueville, the Montesquieu of our 
laws, presents " such unparalleled atrocities as to show 
that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted." 
Until the infinite selfishness of the powers that hate 
and fear the principles of free government swallowed 
up their convenient virtues, that system was hissed at 
by all the old-world civilization. While in one section 
of our land the attempt has been going on to lift it 
out of the category of tolerated wrongs into the sphere 
of the world's beneficent agencies, it was to be expected 
that the protest of Northern manhood and womanhood 
would grow louder and stronger until the conflict of 
principles led to the conflict of forces. The moral up- 
rising of the North came with the logical precision of 
destiny ; the rage of the " petty tyrants " was inevi- 
table ; the plot to erect a slave empire followed with 
fated certainty ; and the only question left for us of 
the North was, whether we should suffer the cause of 



94 PAGES FROM AN OLD YOLUME OF LIFE. 

the Nation to go by default, or maintain its existence 
by the argument of cannon and musket, of bayonet 
and sabre. 

The war in which we are engaged is for no meanly 
ambitious or unworthy purpose. It was primarily, 
and is to this moment, for the preservation of our 
national existence. The first direct movement towards 
it was a civil request on the part of certain Southern 
persons, that the Nation would commit suicide, without 
making any unnecessary trouble about it. It was an- 
swered, with sentiments of the highest consideration, 
that there were constitutional and other objections 
to the Nation's laying violent hands upon itself. It 
was then requested, in a somewhat peremptory tone, 
that the Nation would be so obliging as to abstain from 
food until the natural consequences of that proceeding 
should manifest themselves. All this was done as be- 
tween a single State and an* isolated fortress ; but it 
was not South Carolina and Fort Sumter that were 
talking ; it was a vast conspiracy uttering its menace 
to a mighty nation ; the whole menagerie of treason 
was pacing its cages, ready to spring as soon as the 
doors were opened ; and all that the tigers of rebellion 
wanted to kindle their wild natures to frenzy, was the 
sight of flowing blood. 

As if to show how coldly and calmly all this had 
been calculated beforehand by the conspirators, to 
make sure that no absence of malice aforethought 
should degrade the grand malignity of settled purpose 
into the trivial effervescence of transient passion, the 
torch which was literally to launch the first missile, 
figuratively, to " fire the southern heart " and light 
the flame of civil war, was given into the trembling 



THE INEVITABLE TEIAL. 95 

hand of an old white-headed man, the wretched incen- 
diary whom history will handcuff in eternal infamy 
with the temple-burner of ancient Ephesus, The first 
gun that spat its iron insult at Fort Sumter, smote 
every loyal American full in the face. As when the 
foul witch used to torture her mmiature image, the 
person it represented suffered all that she inflicted on 
his waxen counterpart, so every buffet that fell on the 
smoking fortress was felt by the sovereign nation of 
which that was the re]3resentative. Robbery, could go 
no farther, for every loyal man of the North was de- 
spoiled in that single act as much as if a footpad had 
laid hands upon him to take from him his father's 
staff and his mother's Bible. Insult could go no far- 
ther, for over those battered walls waved the precious 
symbol of all we most value in the past and most hope 
for in the future, — the banner under which we became 
a nation, and which, next to the cross of the Redeemer, 
is the dearest object of love and honor to all who toil 
or march or sail beneath its waving folds of glory. 

Let us pause for a moment to consider what might 
have been the course of events if under the influence 
of fear, or of what some would name humanity, or of 
conscientious scruples to enter upon what a few please 
themselves and their rebel friends by calling a " wicked 
war " ; if under any or all these influences we had 
taken the insult and the violence of South Carolina 
without accepting it as the first blow of a mortal com- 
bat, in which we must either die or give the last and 
finishing stroke. 

By the same title which South Carolina asserted to 
Fort Sumter, Florida would have challenged as her 
own the Gibraltar of the Gulf, and Virginia the Eh- 
renbreitstein of the Chesapeake. Half our navy would 



96 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

have anchored under the guns of these suddenly alien- 
ated fortresses, with the flag of the rebellion flying at 
their peaks. " Old Ironsides " herself would have 
perhaps sailed out of Annapolis harbor to have a 
wooden Jefferson Davis shaped for her figure-head at 
Norfolk, — for Andrew Jackson was a hater of seces- 
sion, and his was no fitting effigy for the battle-ship of 
the red-handed conspiracy. With all the great for- 
tresses, with haK the ships and warlike material, in 
addition to all that was already stolen, in the traitors' 
hands, what chance would the loyal men in the Border 
States have stood against the rush of the desperate fa- 
natics of the now triumphant faction ? Where woidd 
Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, — saved, or 
looking to be saved, even as it is, as by fire, — have 
been in the day of trial ? Into whose hands would the 
Capital, the archives, the glory, the name, the very life 
of the nation as a nation, have fallen, endangered as 
all of them were, in spite of the volcanic outburst of 
the startled North which answered the roar of the first 
gun at Sumter ? Worse than all, are we permitted to 
doubt that in the very bosom of the North itself there 
was a serpent, coiled but not sleeping, which only lis- 
tened for the first word that made it safe to strike, to 
bury its fangs in the heart of Freedom, and blend its 
golden scales in close embrace with the deadly reptile 
of the cotton-fields. Who would not wish that he 
were wrong in such a suspicion ? yet who can forget 
the mysterious warnings that the allies of the rebels 
were to be found far north of the fatal boundary line ; 
and that it was in their own streets, against their own 
brothers, that the champions of liberty were to defend 
her sacred heritage ? 

Not to have fought, then, after the supreme indig- 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 97 

nity and outrage we had suffered, would have been to 
proA^oke every further wrong, and to furnish the means 
for its commission. It would have been to placard 
ourselves on the walls of the shattered fort, as the 
spiritless race the proud labor-thieves called us. It 
would have been to die as a nation of freemen, and to 
have given all we had left of our rights into the hands 
of alien tyrants in league with home-bred traitors. 

Not to have fought would have been to be false to 
liberty everywhere, and to humanity. You have only 
to see who are our friends and who are our enemies 
in this struggle, to decide for what principles we are 
combating. We know too well that the British aris- 
tocracy is not with us. We know what the West End 
of London wishes may be result of this controversy. 
The two halves of this Union are the two blades of the 
shears, threatening as those of Atropos herself, which 
will sooner or later cut into shreds the old charters of 
tyranny. How they would exult if they could but 
break the rivet that makes of the two blades one re- 
sistless weapon ! The man who of all living Ameri- 
cans had the best opportunity of knowing how the fact 
stood, wrote these words in March, 1862 : " That 
Great Britain did, in the most terrible moment of our 
domestic trial in struggling with a monstrous social 
evil she had earnestly professed to abhor, coldly and 
at once assume our inability to master it, and then be- 
come the only foreign nation steadily contributing in 
every indirect way possible to verify its pre-judgment, 
will probably be the verdict made up against her by 
posterity, on a calm comparison of the evidence." 

So speaks the wise, tranquil statesman who repre- 
sents the nation at the Court of St. James, in the 
midst of embarrassments perhaps not less than those 



98 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

which vexed his illustrious grandfather, when he occu- 
pied the same position as the Envoy of the hated, new- 
born Republic. 

" It cannot be denied," — says another observer, 
placed on one of our national watch-towers in a for- 
eign capital, — "it cannot be denied that the tendency 
of European public opinion, as delivered from high 
places, is more and more unfriendly to our cause " ; — 
" but the people," he adds, " everywhere sympathize 
with us, for they know that our cause is that of free 
institutions, — that our struggle is that of the people 
against an oligarchy." These are the words of the 
Minister to Austria, whose generous sympathies with 
popular liberty no homage paid to his genius by the 
class whose admiring welcome is most seductive to 
scholars has ever spoiled ; our fellow-citizen, the histo- 
rian of a great Republic which infused a portion of its 
life into our own, — John Lothrop Motley. 

It is a bitter commentary on the effects of Euro- 
pean, and especially of British institutions, that such 
men should have to speak in such terms of the man- 
ner in which our struggle has been regarded. We 
had, no doubt, very generally reckoned on the sympa- 
thy of England, at least, in a strife which, whatever 
pretexts were alleged as its cause, arrayed upon one 
side the supporters of an institution she was supposed 
to hate in earnest, and on the other its assailants. We 
had forgotten what her own poet, one of the truest and 
purest of her children, had said of his countrymen, in 
words which might well have been spoken by the Brit- 
ish Premier to the American Ambassador asking for 
some evidence of kind feeling on the part of his gov- 
ernment : — 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 99 

" Alas ! expect it not. We found no bait 
To tempt us in thy country. Doing good, 
Disinterested good, is not our trade." 

We kiiow full well by tliis time what truth there is 
in these honest lines. We have found out, too, who 
our European enemies are, and why they are our ene- 
mies. Three bending statues bear up that gilded seat, 
which, in spite of the time-hallowed usurpations and 
consecrated wrongs so long associated with its history, 
is still venerated as the throne. One of these supports 
is the pensioned church ; the second is the purchased 
army; the third is the long-suffering people. When- 
ever the third caryatid comes to life and walks from 
beneath its burden, the capitals of Europe will be filled 
with the broken furniture of palaces. No wonder 
that our ministers find the privileged orders willing to 
see the ominous republic split into two antagonistic 
forces, each paralyzing the other, and standing in their 
mighty impotence a spectacle to courts and kings ; to 
be pointed at as helots who drank themselves blind 
and giddy out of that broken chalice which held the 
poisonous draught of liberty ! 

We know our enemies, and they are the enemies of 
popular rights. We know our friends, and they are the 
foremost champions of political and social progress. 
The eloquent voice and the busy pen of John Bright 
have both been ours, heartily, nobly, from the first; 
the man of the people has been true to the cause of the 
people. That deep and generous thinker, who, more 
than any of her philosophical writers, represents the 
higher thought of England, John Stuart Mill, has 
spoken for us in tones to which none but her sordid 
hucksters and her selfish land-graspers can refuse to 
listen. Count Gasparin and Laboulaye have sent us 



100 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

back the echo from liberal France ; France, the coun- 
try of ideas, whose earlier inspirations embodied them- 
selves for us in the person of the youthful Lafayette. 
Italy, — would you know on which side the rights of 
the people and the hopes of the future are to be found 
in this momentous conflict, what surer test, what am- 
pler demonstration can you ask than the eager sym- 
pathy of the Italian patriot whose name is the hope of 
the toiling many, and the dread of their oppressors, 
wherever it is spoken, the heroic Garibaldi ? 

But even when it is granted that the war was inev- 
itable ; when it is granted that it is for no base end, 
but first for the life of the nation, and more and more, 
as the quarrel deepens, for the welfare of mankind, 
for knowledge as against enforced ignorance, for jus- 
tice as against oppression, for that kingdom of God on 
earth which neither the unrighteous man nor the ex- 
tortioner can hope to inherit, it may still be that the 
strife is hopeless, and must therefore be abandoned. 
Is it too much to say that whether the war is hopeless 
or not for the North depends chiefly on the answer to 
the question, whether the North has virtue and man- 
hood enough to persevere in the contest so long as its 
resources hold out ? But how much virtue and man- 
hood it has can never be told until they are tried, and 
those who are first to doubt the prevailing existence of 
these qualities are not commonly themselves patterns 
of either. We have a right to trust that this people 
is virtuous and brave enough not to give up a just and 
necessary contest before its end is attained, or shown 
to be unattainable for want of material agencies. What 
was the end to be attained by accepting the gage of 
battle ? It was to get the better of our assailants, and, 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 101 

having done so, to take exactly those steps which we 
should then consider necessary to our present and 
future safety. The more obstinate the resistance, the 
more completely must it be subdued. It may not 
even have been desirable, as Mr. Mill suggested long 
since, that the victory over the rebellion should have 
been easily and speedily won, and so have failed to de- 
velop the true meaning of the conflict, to bring out the 
full strength of the revolted section, and to exhaust the 
means which would have served it for a still more des- 
perate future effort. We cannot complain that our 
task has proved too easy. We give our Southern 
army, — for we must remember that it is our army, 
after all, only in a state of mutiny, — we give our 
Southern army credit for excellent spirit and perse- 
verance in the face of many disadvantages. But we 
have a few plain facts which show the probable course 
of events ; the gradual but sure operation of the block- 
ade ; the steady pushing back of the boundary of rebel- 
lion, in spite of resistance at many points, or even of 
such aggressive inroads as that which our armies are 
now meeting with their long lines of bayonets, — may 
God grant them victory ! — the progress of our arms 
down the Mississippi ; the relative value of gold and 
currency at Richmond and Washington. If the index- 
hands of force and credit continue to move in the ratio 
of the past two years, where will the Confederacy be 
in twice or thrice that time ? 

Either all our statements of the relative numbers, 
power, and wealth of the two sections of the country 
signify nothing, or the resources of our opponents in 
men and means must be much nearer exhaustion than 
our own. The running sand of the hour-glass gives 
no warning, but runs as freely as ever when its last 



102 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

grains are about to fall. The merchant wears as bold 
a face the day before he is proclaimed a bankrupt, as 
he wore at the height of his fortunes. If Colonel 
Grierson found the Confederacy " a mere shell," so far 
as his equestrian excursion carried him, how can we 
say how soon the shell will collapse ? It seems impos- 
sible that our own dissensions can produce anything 
more than local disturbances, like the Morristown re- 
volt, which Washington put down at once by the aid 
of his faithful Massachusetts soldiers. But in a rebel- 
lious state dissension is ruin, and the violence of an 
explosion in a strict ratio to the pressure on every inch 
of the containing surface. Now we know the tremen- 
dous force which has compelled the " unanimity " of 
the Southern people. There are men in the ranks of 
the Southern army, if we can trust the evidence which 
reaches us, who have been recruited with packs of 
blood-hounds, and drilled, as it were, with halters 
around their necks. We know what is the bitterness 
of those who have escaped this bloody harvest of the 
remorseless conspirators ; and from that we can judge 
of the elements of destruction incorporated with many 
of the seemingly solid portions of the fabric of the re- 
bellion. The facts are necessarily few, but we can 
reason from the laws of human nature as to what must 
be the feelings of the people of the South to their 
Northern neighbors. It is impossible that the love of 
the life which they have had in common, their glorious 
recollections, their blended histories, their sympathies 
as Americans, their mingled blood, their birthright as 
born under the same flag and protected by it the world 
over, their worship of the same God, under the same 
outward form, at least, and in the folds of the same 
ecclesiastical organizations, should all be forgotten, 



THE INEVITABLE TEIAL. 103 

and leave nothing but hatred and eternal alienation. 
Men do not change in this way, and we may be quite 
sure that the protended unanimity of the South 
will some day or other prove to have been a part of 
the machinery of deception which the plotters have 
managed with such consummate skill. It is hardly to 
be doubted that in every part of the South, as in New 
Orleans, in Charleston, in Richmond, there are multi- 
tudes who wait for the day of deliverance^ and for 
whom the coming of " our good friends, the enemies," 
as Beranger has it, will be like the advent of the 
angels to the prison-cells of Paul and SilaSo But 
there is no need of depending on the aid of our white 
Southern friends, be they many or be they few ; there 
is material power enough in the North, if there be the 
will to use it, to overrun and by. degrees to recolonize 
the South, and it is far from impossible that some such 
process may be a part of the mechanism of its new 
birth, spreading from various centres of organization, 
on the plan which Nature follows when she would fill 
a half-finished tissue with blood-vessels or change a 
temporary cartilage into bonCc, 

Suppose, however, that the prospects of the war 
were, we need not say absolutely hopeless, — because 
that is the unfounded hypothesis of those whose wish 
is father to their thought, — but full of discourage- 
ment. Can we make a safe and honorable peace as 
the quarrel now stands ? As honor comes before 
safety, let us look at that first. We have undertaken 
to resent a supreme insidt, and have had to bear new 
insults and aggressions, even to the direct menace of 
our national capital. The blood which our best and 
bravest have shed will never sink into the ground 
until our wrongs are righted, or the power to right 



104 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

them is shown to be insufficient. If we stop now, all 
the loss of life has been butchery ; if we carry out the 
intention with which we first resented the outrage, the 
earth drinks up the blood of our martyrs, and the rose 
of honor blooms forever where it was shed. To accept 
less than indemnity for the past, so far as the wretched 
kingdom of the conspirators can afford it, and security 
for the future, would discredit us in our own eyes and 
in the eyes of those who hate and long to be able to 
despise us. But to reward the insults and the rob- 
beries we have suffered, by the surrender of our for- 
tresses along the coast, in the national gulf, and on 
the banks of the national river, — and this and much 
more would surely be demanded of us, — would place 
the United Fraction of America on a level with the 
Peruvian guano-islands, whose ignoble but coveted soil 
is open to be plundered by all comers ! 

If we could make a peace without dishonor, could 
we make one that would be safe and lasting ? We 
could have an armistice, no doubt, long enough for the 
flesh of our wounded men to heal and their broken 
bones to knit together. But could we expect a solid, 
substantial, enduring peace, in which the grass would 
have time to grow in the war-paths, and the bruised 
arms to rust, as the old G. R. cannon rusted in our 
State arsenal, sleeping with their tompions in their 
mouths, like so many sucking lambs? It is not the 
question whether the same set of soldiers would be 
again summoned to the field. Let us take it for 
granted that we have seen enough of the miseries of 
warfare to last us for a while, and keep us contented 
with militia musters and sham-fights. The question is 
whether we could leave our children and our children's 
children with any secure trust that they would not 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 105 

have to go througli the very trials we are enduring, 
probably on a more extended scale and in a more ag- 
gravated form. 

It may be well to look at the prospects before us, if 
a peace is established on the basis of Southern inde- 
pendence, the only peace possible, unless we choose to 
add ourselves to the four millions who already call the 
Southern whites their masters. We know what the 
prevailing — we do not mean universal — spirit and 
temper of those people have been for generations, and 
what they are like to be after a long and bitter war- 
fare. We know what their tone is to the people of 
the North ; if we do not, De Bow and Governor Ham- 
mond are schoolmasters who will teach us to our 
heart's content. We see how easily their social organ- 
ization adapts itself to a state of warfare. They breed 
a superior order of men for leaders, an ignorant com- 
monalty ready to follow them as the vassals of feudal 
times followed their lords ; and a race of bondsmen, 
who, unless this war changes them from chattels to 
human beings, will continue to add vastly to their mil- 
itary strength in raising their food, in building their 
fortifications, in all the mechanical work of war, in 
fact, except, it may be, the handling of weapons. The 
institution proclaimed as the corner-stone of their gov- 
ernment does violence not merely to the precepts of 
religion, but to many of the best human instincts, yet 
their fanaticism for it is as sincere as any tribe of the 
desert ever manifested for the faith of the Prophet of 
Allah. They call themselves by the same name as the 
Christians of the North, yet there is as much differ- 
ence between their Christianity and that of Wesley or 
of Channing, as between creeds that in past times have 
vowed mutual extermination. Still we must not call 



106 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

them barbarians because they cherish an institution 
hostile to civilization. Their highest culture stands 
out all the more brilliantly from the dark background 
of ignorance against which it is seen ; but it would be 
injustice to deny that they have always shone in politi- 
cal science, or that their military capacity makes them 
most formidable antagonists, and that, however infe- 
rior they may be to their Northern fellow-countrymen 
in most branches of literature and science, the social 
elegances and personal graces lend their outward show 
to the best circles among their dominant class. 

Whom have we then for our neighbors, in case of 
separation, — our neighbors along a splintered line of 
fracture extending for thousands of miles, — but the 
Saracens of the Nineteenth Century ; a fierce, intol- 
erant, fanatical people, the males of which will be a 
perpetual standing army ; hating us worse than the 
Southern Hamilcar taught his swarthy boy to hate the 
Romans ; a people whose existence as a hostile nation 
on our frontier is incompatible with our peaceful de- 
velopment? Their wealth, the proceeds of enforced 
labor, multiplied by the breaking up of new cotton- 
fields, and in due time by the reopening of the slave- 
trade, will go to purchase arms, to construct fortresses, 
to fit out navies. The old Saracens, fanatics for a re- 
ligion which professed to grow by conquest, were a na- 
tion of predatory and migrating warriors. The South- 
ern people, fanatics for a system essentially aggressive, 
conquering, wasting, which cannot remain stationary, 
but must grow by alternate appropriations of labor 
and of land, will come to resemble their earlier proto- 
types. Already, even, the insolence of their language 
to the people of the North is a close imitation of the 
style which those proud and arrogant Asiatics affected 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 107 

toward all tlie nations of Europe. What the " Chris- 
tian dogs " were to the followers of Mahomet, the "ac- 
cursed Yankees," the " Northern mudsills " are to the 
followers of the Southern Moloch. The accomplish- 
ments wliich we find in their choicer circles were pre- 
figured in the court of the chivalric Saladin, and the 
long train of Painim knights who rode forth to con- 
quest under the Crescent. In all branches of culture, 
their heathen predecessors went far beyond them. The 
schools of mediaeval learning were filled with Arabian 
teachers. The heavens declare the glory of the Orien- 
tal astronomers, as Algorab and Aldebaran repeat 
their Arabic names to the students of the starry firma- 
ment. The sumptuous edifice erected by the Art of the 
nineteenth century, to hold the treasures of its Indus- 
try, could show nothing fairer than the court which 
copies the Moorish palace that crowns the summit of 
Granada. Yet this was the power which Charles the 
Hammer, striking for Christianity and civilization, had 
to break like a potter's vessel ; these were the people 
whom Spain had to utterly extirpate from the land 
where they had ruled for centuries ! 

Prepare, then, if you unseal the vase which holds 
this dangerous Afrit of Southern nationality, for a 
power on your borders that will be to you what the 
Saracens were to Europe before the son of Pepin shat- 
tered their armies, and flung the shards and shivers of 
their broken strength upon the refuse heap of extin- 
guished barbarisms. Prepare for the possible fate of 
Christian Spain ; for a slave-market in Philadelphia ; 
for the Alhambra of a Southern caliph on the grounds 
consecrated by the domestic virtues of a long line of 
Presidents and their exemplary families. Remember 
the ages of border warfare between England and Scot- 



108 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

land, closed at last by the union of the two kingdoms. 
Recollect the hunting of the deer on the Cheviot hills, 
and all that it led to ; then think of the game which 
the dogs will follow open-mouthed across our Southern 
border, and all that is like to follow which the child 
may rue that is unborn ; think of these possibilities, or 
probabilities, if you will, and say whether you are 
ready to make a peace which will give you such a 
neighbor ; which may betray your civilization as that 
of haK the Peninsula was given up to the Moors ; 
which may leave your fair border provinces to be 
crushed under the heel of a tyrant, as Holland was 
left to be trodden down by the Duke of Alva ! 

No I no I fellow-citizens ! We must fight in this 
quarrel until one side or the other is exhausted. 
Rather than suffer all that we have poured out of our 
blood, all that we have lavished of our substance, to 
have been expended in vain, and to bequeath an un- 
settled question, an unfinished conflict, an unavenged 
insult, an unrighted wrong, a stained escutcheon, a tar- 
nished shield, a dishonored flag, an unheroic memory 
to the descendants of those who have always claimed 
that their fathers were heroes ; rather than do all this, 
it were hardly an American exaggeration to say, better 
that the last man and the last dollar should be followed 
by the last woman and the last dime, the last child and 
the last copper ! 

There are those who profess to fear that our govern- 
ment is becoming a mere irresponsible tyranny. If 
there are any who really believe that our present Chief 
Magistrate means to found a dynasty for himself and 
family, — that a coup d' etat is in preparation by which 
he is to become Abraham, Dei Gratia Rex, — they 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 109 

cannot have duly pondered his letter of June 12th, in 
which he unbosoms himself with the simplicity of a 
rustic lover called upon by an anxious parent to ex- 
plain his intentions. The force of his argument is not 
at all injured by the homeliness of his illustrations. 
The American people are not much afraid that their 
liberties will be usurped. An army of legislators is not 
very likely to throw away its political privileges, and 
the idea of a despotism resting on an open ballot-box, 
is like that of Bunker Hill Monument built on the 
waves of Boston Harbor. We know pretty well how 
much of sincerity there is in the fears so clamorously 
expressed, and how far they are found in company with 
uncompromising hostility to the armed enemies of the 
nation. We have learned to put a true value on the 
services of the watch-dog who bays the moon, but does 
not bite the thief ! 

The men who are so busy holy-stoning the quarter- 
deck, while all hands are wanted to keep the ship 
afloat, can no doubt show spots upon it that would be 
very unsightly in fair weather. No thoroughly loyal 
man, however, need suffer from any arbitrary exercise 
of power, such as emergencies always give rise to. If 
any half-loyal man forgets his code of half-decencies 
and half-duties so far as to become obnoxious to the 
peremptory justice which takes the place of slower 
forms in all centres of conflagration, there is no sym- 
pathy for him among the soldiers who are risking their 
lives for us ; perhaps there is even more satisfaction 
than when an avowed traitor is caught and punished. 
For of all men who are loathed by generous natures, 
such as fill the ranks of the armies of the Union, none 
are so thorouglily loathed as the men who contrive to 
keep just within the limits of the law, while their whole 



110 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

conduct provokes others to break it ; whose patriotism 
consists in stopping an inch short of treason, and whose 
political morality has for its safeguard a just respect 
for the jailer and the hangman ! The simple preven- 
tive against all possible injustice a citizen is like to 
suffer at the hands of a government which in its need 
and haste must of course commit many errors, is to 
take care to do nothing that will directly or indirectly 
help the enemy, or hinder the government in carrying 
on the war. When the clamor against usurpation and 
tyranny comes from citizens who can claim this neg- 
ative merit, it may be listened to. When it comes 
from those who have done what they could to serve 
their comitry, it will receive the attention it deserves. 
Doubtless there may prove to be wrongs which de- 
mand righting, but the pretence of any plan for 
changing the essential principle of our self-governing 
system is a figment which its contrivers laugh over 
among themselves. Do the citizens of Harrisburg or 
of Philadelphia quarrel to-day about the strict legality 
of an executive act meant in good faith for their pro- 
tection against the invader? We are all citizens of 
Harrisburg, all citizens of Philadelphia, in this hour 
of their peril, and with the enemy at work in our own 
harbors, we begin to understand the difference between 
a good and bad citizen ; the man that helps and the 
man that hinders ; the man who, while the pirate is in 
sight, complains that our anchor is dragging in his 
mud, and the man who violates the proprieties, like 
our brave Portland brothers, when they jumped on 
board the first steamer they could reach, cut her cable, 
and bore down on the corsair, with a habeas corpus 
act that lodged twenty buccaneers in Fort Preble before 
sunset ! 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. Ill 

We cannot, then, we cannot be circling inward to be 
swallowed up in the whirlpool of national destruction. 
If our borders are invaded, it is only as the spur that 
is driven into the courser's flank to rouse his slumber- 
ing mettle. If our property is taxed, it is only ta 
teach us that liberty is worth paying for as well as 
fighting for. We are pouring out the most generous 
blood of our youth and manhood ; alas ! this is always 
the price that must be paid for the redemption of a 
people. What have we to complain of, whose grana- 
ries are choking with plenty, whose streets are gay 
with shining robes and glittering equipages, whose in- 
dustry is abundant enough to reap all its overflowing 
harvest, yet sure of employment and of its just re- 
ward, the soil of whose mighty valleys is an inex- 
haustible mine of fertility, whose mountains cover up 
such stores of heat and power, imprisoned in their 
coal measures, as would warm all the inhabitants and 
work all the machinery of our planet for unnumbered 
ages, whose rocks pour out rivers of oil, whose streams 
run yellow over beds of golden sand, — what have we 
to complain of ? 

Have we degenerated from our English fathers, so 
that we cannot do and bear for our national salvation 
what they have done and borne over and over again 
for their form of government? Could England, in 
her wars with Napoleon, bear an income-tax of ten 
per cent., and must we faint under the burden of an 
income-tax of three per cent. ? Was she content to 
negotiate a loan at fifty-three for the hundred, and that 
paid in depreciated paper, and can we talk about finan- 
cial ruin with our national stocks ranging from one to 
eight or nine above par, and the " five-twenty " war 
loan eagerly taken by our own people to the amount 



112 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

of nearly two hundred millions, without any check to 
the flow of the current pressing inwards against the 
doors of the Treasury ? Except in those portions of 
the country which are the immediate seat of war, or 
liable to be made so, and which, having the greatest 
interest not to become the border states of hostile 
nations, can best afford to suffer now, the state of 
prosperity and comfort is such as to astonish those 
who visit us from other countries. What are war 
taxes to a nation which, as we are assured on good au- 
thority, has more men worth a million now than it had 
worth ten thousand dollars at the close of the Revolu- 
tion, — whose whole property is a hundred times, and 
whose commerce, inland and foreign, is ^ve hundred 
times, what it was then ? But we need not study Mr. 
Stille's pamphlet and " Thompson's Bank-Note Re- 
porter " to show us what we know well enough, — 
that, so far from having occasion to tremble in fear of 
our impending ruin, we must rather blush for our ma- 
terial prosperity. For the multitudes who are unfor- 
tunate enough to be taxed for a million or more, of 
course we must feel deeply, at the same time suggest- 
ing that the more largely they report their incomes to 
the tax-gatherer, the more consolation they will find in 
the feeling that they have served their country. But, 
— let us say it plainly, — it will not hurt our people to 
be taught that there are other things to be cared for 
besides money-making and money-spending ; that the 
time has come when manhood must assert itself by 
brave deeds and noble thoughts ; when womanhood 
must assume its most sacred office, " to warn, to com- 
fort," and, if need be, "to command," those whose 
services their country calls for. This Northern section 
of the land has become a great variety shop, of which 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 113 

the Atlantic cities are the long-extended counter. We 
have grown rich for what? To put gilt bands on 
coaclunen's hats ? To sweep the foul sidewalks with 
the heaviest silks which the toiling artisans of France 
can send us? To look through plate-glass windows, 
and pity the brown soldiers, — or sneer at the black 
ones ? to reduce the speed of trotting horses a second 
or two below its old minimum ? to color meerschaums ? 
to flaunt in laces, and sparkle in diamonds ? to dredge 
our maidens' hair with gold-dust ? to float through life, 
the passive shuttlecocks of fashion, from the avenues 
to the beaches, and back again from the beaches to the 
avenues ? Was it for this that the broad domain of 
the Western hemisphere was kept so long unvisited by 
civilization ? — for this, that Time, the father of em- 
pires, unbound the virgin zone of this youngest of his 
daughters, and gave her, beautiful in the long veil of 
her forests, to the rude embrace of the adventurous 
Colonist ? All this is what we see around us, now, — 
now while we are actually fighting this great battle, 
and supporting this great load of indebtedness. Wait 
till the diamonds go back to the Jews of Amsterdam ; 
till the plate-glass window bears the fatal announce- 
ment, For Sale or to Let', till the voice of our Miriam 
is obeyed, as she sings, 

" Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms ! " 

till the gold-dust is combed from the golden locks, and 
hoarded to buy bread ; till the fast-driving youth 
smokes his clay-pipe on the platform of the horse-cars ; 
till the music-grinders cease because none will pay 
them; till there are no peaches in the windows at 
twenty-four dollars a dozen, and no heaps of bananas 
and pine-apples selling at the street-corners ; till the 



114 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ten-flounced dress has but three flounces, and it is 
felony to drink champagne ; wait till these changes 
show themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the pre- 
ludes of exhaustion and bankruptcy ; then let us talk 
of the Maelstrom ; — but till then, let us not be cow- 
ards with our purses, while brave men are emptying 
their hearts upon the earth for us ; let us not whine 
over our imaginary ruin, while the reversed current of 
circling events is carrying us farther and farther, 
every hour, out of the influence of the great failing 
which was born of our wealth, and of the deadly sin 
which was our fatal inheritance ! 

Let us take a brief general glance at the wide field 
of discussion we are just leaving. 

On Friday, the twelfth day of the month of April, 
in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and sixty- 
one, at half-past four of the clock in the morning, a 
cannon was aimed and fired by the authority of South 
Carolina at the wall of a fortress belonging to the 
United States. Its ball carried with it the hatreds, 
the rages of thirty years, shaped and cooled in the 
mould of malignant deliberation. Its wad was the 
charter of our national existence. Its muzzle was 
pointed at the stone which bore the symbol of our na- 
tional sovereignty. As the echoes of its thunder died 
away, the telegraph clicked one word through every 
office of the land. That word was War ! 

War is a child that devours its nurses one after an- 
other, until it is claimed by its true parents. This 
war has eaten its way backward through all the tech- 
nicalities of lawyers learned in the infinitesimals of 
ordinances and statutes ; through all the casuistries of 
divines, experts in the differential calculus of con- 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL. 115 

science and duty ; until it stands revealed to all men 
as the natural and inevitable conflict of two incom- 
patible forms of civilization, one or the other of which 
must dominate the central zone of the continent, and 
eventually claim the hemisphere for its development. 

We have reached the region of those broad princi- 
ples and large axioms which the wise Romans, the 
world's lawgivers, always recognized as above all spe- 
cial enactments. We have come to that solid substra- 
tum acknowledged by Grotius in his great Treatise: 
"Necessity itself which reduces things to the mere 
right of Nature." The old rules which were enough 
for our guidance in quiet times, have become as mean- 
ingless " as moonlight on the dial of the day." We 
have followed precedents as long as they could guide 
us ; now we must make precedents for the ages which 
are to succeed us. 

If we are frightened from our object by the money 
we have spent, the current prices of United States 
stocks show that we value our nationality at only a 
small fraction of our wealth. If we feel that we are 
paying too dearly for it in the blood of our people, 
let us recall those grand words of Samuel Adams : — 

" I should advise persisting in our struggle for 
liberty, though it were revealed from heaven that nine 
hundred and ninety-nine were to perish, and only one 
of a thousand were to survive and retain his liberty ! " 

What we want now is a strong purpose ; the pur- 
pose of Luther, when he said, in repeating his Pater 
Noster, fiat voluntas mea, — let my will be done ; 
though he considerately added, quia Tua^ — because 
my will is Thine. We want the virile energy of de- 
termination which made the oath of Andrew Jackson 
sound so like the devotion of an ardent saint that the 



116 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

recording augel might have entered it unquestioned 
among the prayers of the faithful. 

War is a grim business. Two years ago our wom- 
en's fingers were busy making " Havelocks." It 
seemed to us then as if the Havelock made half the 
soldier ; and now we smile to think of those days of 
inexperience and illusion. We know now what War 
means, and we cannot look its dull, dead ghastliness 
in the face unless we feel that there is some great and 
noble principle behind it. It makes little difference 
what we thought we were fighting for at first ; we 
know what we are fighting for now, and what we are 
fighting against. 

We are fighting for our existence. We say to 
those who would take back their several contributions 
to that undivided unity which we call the Nation ; the 
bronze is cast ; the statue is on its pedestal ; you can- 
not reclaim the brass you flung into the crucible! 
There are rights, possessions, privileges, policies, re- 
lations, duties, acquired, retained, called into existence 
in virtue of the principle of absolute solidarity, — be- 
longing to the United States as an organic whole, — 
which cannot be divided, which none of its constitu- 
ent parties can claim as its own, which perish out of 
its living frame when the wild forces of rebellion tear 
it limb from limb, and which it must defend, or con- 
fess self-government itself a failure. 

We are fighting for that Constitution upon which 
our national existence reposes, now subjected by those 
who fired the scroll on which it was written from the 
cannon at Fort Sumter, to all those chances which 
the necessities of war entail upon every human ar- 
rangement, but stiU the venerable charter of our wide 
Republic. 



THE INEVITABLE TEIAL. 117 

We cannot fight for these objects without attack- 
ing the one motlier cause of all the progeny of lesser 
antagonisms. Whether we know it or not, whether 
we mean it or not, we cannot help fighting against the 
system that has proved the source of all those miseries 
which the author of the Declaration of Independence 
trembled to anticipate. And this ought to make us 
willing to do and to suffer cheerfully. There were 
Holy Wars of old, in which it was glory enough to 
die, wars in which the one aim was to rescue the sep- 
ulchre of Christ from the hands of infidels. The 
sepulchre of Christ is not in Palestine ! He rose 
from that burial-place more than eighteen hundred 
years ago. He is crucified wherever his brothers are 
slain without cause ; he lies buried wherever man, 
made in his Maker's image, is entombed in ignorance 
lest he should learn the rights which his Divine Mas- 
ter gave him I This is our Holy War, and we must 
fight it against that great General who will bring to 
it all the powers with which he fought against the 
Almighty before he was cast down from heaven. He 
has retained many a cunning advocate to recruit for 
him ; he has bribed many a smooth-tongued preacher 
to be his chaplain ; he has engaged the sordid by 
their avarice, the timid by their fears, the profligate 
by their love of adventure, and thousands of nobler 
natures by motives which we can all understand ; 
whose delusion we pity as we ought always to pity the 
error of those who know not what they do. Against 
him or for him we are all called upon to declare our- 
selves. There is no neutrality for any single true- 
born American. If any seek such a position, the 
stony finger of Dante's awful muse points them to 
their place in the antechamber of the Halls of De- 
spair, — 



118 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

— " With that ill band 
Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved, 
Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves 
Were only." — 

— " Fame of them the world hath none 
Nor suffers ; mercy and justice scorn them both. 
Speak not of them, but look, and pass them by." 

We must use all tlie means wHch God has put into 
our hands to serve him against the enemies of civiliza- 
tion. We must make and keep the great river free, 
whatever it costs us ; it is strapping up the forefoot of 
the wild, untamable rebellion. We must not be too 
nice in the choice of our agents. Non eget Mauri 
jaculis^ — no African bayonets wanted, — was well 
enough while we did not yet know the might of that 
desperate giant we had to deal with ; but Tros^ Ty- 
riusve, — white or black, — is the safer motto now; 
for a good soldier, like a good horse, cannot be of a 
bad color. The iron-skins, as well as the iron-clads, 
have already done us noble service, and many a mother 
will clasp the returning boy, many a wife will welcome 
back the war-worn husband, whose smile would never 
again have gladdened his home, but that, cold in the 
shallow trench of the battle-field, lies the half-buried 
form of the unchained bondsman whose dusky bosom 
sheathes the bullet which would else have claimed 
that darling as his country's sacrifice ! 

We shall have success if we truly will success, — 
not otherwise. It may be long in coming, — Heaven 
only knows through what trials and humblings we may 
have to pass before the full strength of the nation is 
duly arrayed and led to victory. We must be patient, 
as our fathers were patient ; even in our worst calami- 
ties, we must remember that defeat itself may be a 



THE INEVITABLE TRIAL, 119 

gain where it costs our enemy more in relation to his 
strength than it costs ourselves. But if, in the inscru- 
table providence of the Almighty, this generation is 
disappointed in its lofty aspirations for the race, if we 
have not virtue enough to ennoble our whole people, 
and make it a nation of sovereigns, we shall at least 
hold in undying honor those who vindicated the in- 
sulted majesty of the Republic, and struck at her as- 
sailants so long as a drum-beat summoned them to the 
field of duty. 

Citizens of Boston, sons and daughters of New Eng- 
land, men and women of the North, brothers and 
sisters in the bond of the American Union, you have 
among you the scarred and wasted soldiers who have 
shed their blood for your temporal salvation. They 
bore your nation's emblems bravely through the fire 
and smoke of the battle-field; nay, their o^n bodies 
are starred with bullet-wounds and striped with sabre- 
cuts, as if to mark them as belonging to their country 
until their dust becomes a portion of the soil which 
they defended. In every Northern graveyard slumber 
the victims of this destroying struggle. Many whom 
you remember playing as children amidst the clover- 
blossoms of our Northern fields, sleep under nameless 
mounds with strange Southern wild-flowers blooming 
over them. By those wounds of Kving heroes, by those 
graves of fallen martyrs, by the hopes of your children, 
and the claims of your children's children yet unborn, 
in the name of outraged honor, in the interest of vio- 
lated sovereignty, for the life of an imperilled nation, 
for the sake of men everywhere and of our common 
humanity, for the glory of God and the advancement 
of his kingdom on earth, your country calls upon you 
to stand by her through good report and through evil 



120 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

report, in triumph and in defeat, until she emerges 
from the great war of Western civilization, Queen of 
the broad continent, Arbitress in the councils of earth's 
emancipated peoples ; until the flag that fell from the 
wall of Fort Sumter floats again inviolate, supreme, 
over all her ancient inheritance, every fortress, every 
capital, every ship, and this warring land is once more 
a United Nation ! 




THE PHYSIOLOGY OF WALKING. 

The two accomplishments common to all mankind 
are walking and talking. Simple as tkey seem, they 
are yet acquired with vast labor, and very rarely un- 
derstood in any clear way by those who practise them 
with perfect ease and unconscious skill. 

Talking seems the hardest to comprehend. Yet it 
has been clearly explained and successfully imitated by 
artificial contrivances. We know that the moist mem- 
branous edges of a narrow crevice (the glottis) vibrate 
as the reed of a clarionet vibrates, and thus produce 
the human hleat. We narrow or widen or check or 
stop the flow of this sound by the lips, the tongue, the 
teeth, and thus articulate^ or break into joints, the 
even current of sound. The sound varies with the de- 
gree and kind of interruption, as the " babble " of the 
brook with the shape and size of its impediments, — - 



122 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

pebbles, or rocks, or dams. To wMsper is to articulate 
without bleating^ or vocalizing, to coo as babies do is 
to bleat or vocalize without articulating. Machines 
are easily made that bleat not unlike human beings. 
A bit of India-rubber tube tied round a piece of glass 
tube is one of the simplest voice-uttering contrivancesc 
To make a machine that articulates is not so easy i 
but we remember Maelzel's wooden children, which 
said, " Pa-pa " and " Ma-ma " ; and more elaborate and 
successful speaking machines have, we believe, been 
since constructed. 

But no man has been able to make a figure that can 
walh. Of all the automata imitating men or animals 
moving, there is not one in which the legs are the true 
sources of motion. So said the Webers " more than 
twenty years ago, and it is as true now as then. These 
authors, after a profound experimental and mathemat- 
ical investigation of the mechanism of animal locomo- 
tion, recognize the fact that our knowledge is not yet 
so far advanced that we can hope to succeed in mak- 
ing real walking machines. But they conceive that 
the time may come hereafter when colossal figures will 
be constructed whose giant strides will not be arrested 
by the obstacles which are impassable to wheeled con- 
veyances. 

We wish to give our readers as clear an idea as pos- 
sible of that wonderful art of balanced vertical pro- 
gression which they have practised, as M. Jourdain 
talked prose, for so many years, without knowing what 
a marvellous accomplishment they had mastered. We 
shall have to begin with a few simple anatomical data. 

" Traite de la Mechaniqne des Organes de la Locomotion. 
Translated from the German in the Encyclopedie Anatomique. 
Paris, 1843. 



THE PHYSIOLOGY OF WALKING. 123 

The foot is arched both longitudinally and trans- 
versely, so as to give it elasticity, and thus break the 
sudden shock when the weight of the body is thrown 
upon it. The ankle-joint is a loose hinge, and the 
great muscles of the calf can straighten the foot out 
so far that practised dancers walli on the tips of their 
toes. The knee is another hinge-joint, which allows 
the leg to bend freely, but not to be carried beyond a 
straight line in the other direction. Its further for- 
ward movement is checked by two very powerful cords 
in the interior of the joint, which cross each other Kke 
the letter X, and are hence called the crucial liga- 
ments. The upper ends of the thigh-bones are almost 
globes, which are received into the deep cup-like cavi- 
ties of the haunch-bones. They are tied to these last 
so loosely, that, if their ligaments alone held them, 
they would be half out of their sockets in many posi- 
tions of the lower limbs. But here comes in a simple 
and admirable contrivance. The smooth, rounded 
head of the thigh-bone, moist with glairy fluid, fits so 
perfectly into the smooth, rounded cavity which re- 
ceives it, that it holds firmly by suction., or atmos- 
pheric pressure. It takes a hard pull to draw it out 
after all the ligaments are cut, and then it comes with 
a smack like a tight cork from a bottle. Holding in 
this way by the close apposition of two polished sur- 
faces, the lower extremity swings freely forward and 
backward like a pendulum.^ if we give it a chance, as 
is shown by standing on a chair upon the other limb, 
and moving the pendent one out of the vertical line. 
The force with which it swings depends upon its 
weight, and this is much greater than we might at first 
suppose ; for our limbs not only carry themselves, but 
our bodies also, with a sense of lightness rather than 



124 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

of weight, wlien we are in good, condition. Accident 
sometimes makes us aware how heavy our limbs are. 
An officer, whose arm was shattered by a ball in one 
of our late battles, told us that the dead weight of the 
helpless member seemed to drag him down to the 
earth ; he could hardly carry it ; it " weighed a ton," 
to his feeling, as he said. 

In ordinary walking a man's lower extremity swings 
essentially by its own weight, requiring little muscular 
effort to help it. So heavy a body easily overcomes 
all impediments from clothing, even in the sex least 
favored in its costume. But if a man's legs are pen- 
dulums, then a short man's legs will swing quicker 
than a tall man's, and he will take more steps to a 
minute, other things being equal. Thus there is a nat- 
ural rhythm to a man's walk, depending on the length 
of his legs, which beat more or less rapidly as they are 
longer or shorter, like metronomes differently ad- 
justed, or the pendulums of different time-keepers. 
Commodore Nutt is to M. Bihin in this respect as a 
little, fast-ticking mantel-clock is to an old-fashioned, 
solemn-clicking, upright time-piece. 

The mathematical formulae in which the Messrs. 
Weber embody their results would hardly be instruc- 
tive to most of our readers. The figures of their 
Atlas would serve our purpose better, had we not the 
means of coming nearer to the truth than even their 
careful studies enabled them to do. We have selected 
a number of instantaneous stereoscopic views of the 
streets and public places of Paris and of New York, 
each of them showing numerous walking figures, 
among which some may be found in every stage of the 
complex act we are studying. Mr. Darley has had 
the kindness to leave his higher tasks to transfer sev- 



THE PHYSIOLOGY OF WALKING. 



125 



eral of these to our pages, so that the reader may be 
sure that he looks upon an exact copy of real human 
individuals in the act of walking. 

The first subject is caught with his legs stretched in 
a stride, the remarkable length of which arrests our 
attention. The sole of the right foot is almost verti- 
cal. By the action of the muscles of the calf it has 
rolled off from the ground like a portion of the tire of 




Fig. 1. 

a wheel, the heel rising first, and thus the body, al- 
ready advancing with all its acquired velocity, and in- 
clined forward, has been pushed along, and, as it were, 
tipped over, so as to fall upon the other foot, now 
ready to receive its weight. 

In the second figure, the right leg is bending at the 
knee, so as to lift the foot from the ground, in order 
that it may swing forward. 

The next stage of movement is shown in the left leg 



126 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

of Figure 3. This leg is seen suspended in air, a lit- 
tle beyond the middle of tlie arc through which it 
swings, and before it has straightened itself, which it 
will presently do, as shown in the next figure. 

The foot has now swung forward, and tending to 
swing back again, the limb being straightened, and the 
body tipped forward, the heel strikes the ground. The 
angle which the sole of the foot forms with the ground 
increases with the length of the stride; and as this 




Fig. 2. ) 

last surprised us, so the extent of this angle astonishes 
us in many of the figures, in this among the rest. 

The heel strikes the ground with great force, as the 
wear of our boots and shoes in that part shows us. 
But the projecting heel of the human foot is the arm 
of a lever, having the ankle-joint as its fulcrum, and, 
as it strikes the ground, brings the sole of the foot 
down flat upon it, as shown in Fig. 1. At the same 
time the weight of the limb and body is thrown upon 



THE PHYSIOLOGY OF WALKING. 127 

the foot, by the joint effect of muscular action and ac- 
quired velocity, and the other foot is now ready to rise 
from the ground and repeat the process we have traced 
in its fellow. 

No artist would have dared to draw a walking fig= 
ure in attitudes like some of these. The swinging 
limb is so much shortened that the toe never by any 
accident scrapes the ground, if this is tolerably even. 
In cases of partial paralysis, the scraping of the toe, as 




the patient walks, is one of the characteristic marks of 
imperfect muscular action. 

Walking, then, is a perpetual falling with a perpet- 
ual self -recovery. It is a most complex, violent, and 
perilous operation, which we divest of its extreme dan- 
ger only by continual practice from a very early pe- 
riod of life. We find how complex it is when we 
attempt to analyze it, and we see that we never under- 
stood it thoroughly until the time of the instantaneous 



128 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

photograph. We learn how violent it is, when we 
walk against a post or a door in the dark. We discover 
how dangerous it is, when we slip or trip and come 
down, perhaps breaking or dislocating our limbs, or 
overlook the last step of a flight of stairs, and discover 
with what headlong violence we have been hurling 
ourselves forward. 

Two curious facts are easily proved. First, a man 
is shorter when he is walking than when at rest. We 




Fig. 4. 

have found a very simple way of showing this by hav- 
ing a rod or yardstick placed horizontally, so as to 
touch the top of the head forcibly, as we stand under 
it. In walking rapidly beneath it, even if the eyes are 
shut, to avoid involuntary stooping, the top of the 
head will not even graze the rod. The other fact is, 
that one side of a man always tends to outwalk the 
other side, so that no person can walk far in a straight 
line, if he is blindfolded. 



THE PHYSIOLOGY OF WALKING. 129 

The somewhat singular iUustration at the head of 
our article carries out an idea which has only been par- 
tially alluded to by others. Man is a wheels with two 
spokes, his legs, and two fragments of a tire, his feet. 
He rolls successively on each of these fragments from 
the heel to the toe. If he had spokes enough, he would 
go round and round as the boys do when they " make 
a wheel " with their four limbs for its spokes. But 
having only two available for ordinary locomotion, 
each of these has to be taken up as soon as it has been 
used, and carried forward to be used again, and so al- 
ternately with the pair. The pecidiarity of biped- 
walking is, that the centre of gravity is shifted from 
one leg to the other, and the one not employed can 
shorten itself so as to swing forward, passing by that 
which supports the body. 

This is just what no automaton can do. Many of 
our readers have, however, seen a young lady in the 
shop windows, or entertained her in their own nurse- 
ries, who professes to be this hitherto impossible walk- 
ing automaton, and who calls herself by the Homer- 
ic-sounding epithet Autoperipatetikos. The golden- 
booted legs of this young lady remind us of Miss 
Kilmansegg, while the size of her feet assures us that 
she is not in any way related to Cinderella. On being 
wound up, as if she were a piece of machinery, and 
placed on a level surface, she proceeds to toddle off, 
taking very short steps, like a child, holding herself 
very stiff and straight, with a little lifting at each step, 
and all this with a mighty inward whirring and buzz- 
ing of the enginery which constitutes her muscular 
system. 

An autopsy of one of her family who fell into our 
hands reveals the secret springs of her action. Wish- 



130 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ing to spare her as a member of the defenceless sex, it 
pains us to say, that, ingenious as her counterfeit walk- 
ing is, she is an impostor. Worse than this, — with 
all our reverence for her brazen crinoline, duty compels 
us to reveal a fact concerning her which will shock the 
feelings of those who have watched the stately rigidity 
of decorum with which she moves in the presence of 
admiring multitudes. She is a quadruped 1 Inside 
of her great golden boots, which represent one pair of 
feet, is another smaller pair, which move freely through 
those hollow casings. 

Four cams or eccentric wheels impart motion to her 
four supports, by which she is carried forward, always 




resting on two of them, — the boot of one side and the 
foot of the other. Her movement, then, is not walk- 
ing ; it is not skating, which it seems to resemble ; it is 
more like that of a person walking with two crutches 
besides his two legs. The machinery is simple enough ; 
a strong spiral spring, three or four cog-wheels and 
pinions, a fly to regulate the motion, as in a musical 
box, and the cams before mentioned. As a toy, it or 
she is very taking to grown people as well as children. 
It is a literal fact, that the police requested one of our 



THE PHYSIOLOGY OF WALKING. 131 

dealers to remove Miss Autoperipatetikos from his 
window, because the crowd she drew obstructed the 
sidewalk. 

It is said that a steam man is in process of construc- 
tion at this time (January, 1883), who is to stride over 
the roughest roads dragging his burden after him. 
The answer to any doubt is Solvitur Amhulando. 



Y. 
THE SEASONS. 

SPRING. 

The following notice has been put up everywhere in 
flaming letters for about six thousand years, according 
to the chronology of Archbishop Usher, and for a 
much longer period, if some more recent cosmogonists 
can be trusted : — 

" Walk in, ladies and gentlemen ! The wonderful 
exhibition of the Seasons is about to commence ; four 
shows under one cover ; the best ventilated place of 
entertainment in this or any other system ; the stage 
lighted by solar, lunar, and astral lamps ; an efficient 
police will preserve order. Gentlemanly ushers will 
introduce all new-comers to their places. Perform- 
ance in twelve parts. Overture by the feathered 
choir ; after which the white drop curtain will rise, 
showing the remarkable succession of natural scenery 
designed and executed solely for this planet, — real 
forests, meadows, water, earth, skies, etc. At the con- 
elusion of each series of performances the storm-chorus 
will be given with the whole strength of the wind-in- 
strument orchestra, and the splendid snow scene will 
be introduced, illuminated by grand flashes of the 
Aurora Borealis. Admittance free, refreshments fur- 
nished, complete suits of proper costume supplied at 
the door, to he returned on leaving the exhibition.''^ 



THE SEASONS. 133 

Such is Nature's programme, — wortli attending to, 
one might think, — yet there are great multitudes 
who lomige into the show and out of it, after being 
present at as many as threescore and ten performances 
in succession, without ever really looking at the scen- 
ery, or listening to the music, or observing the chief 
actors in the great drama. Some are too busy with 
their books or their handicraft, and many women, 
even, who ought to enjoy the sights, keep their eyes 
on their work or their knitting, so that they seem to 
see next to nothing of what is going on. 

In the mean time those who are really awake to the 
sights and sounds which the procession of the months 
offers them find endless entertainment and instruction. 
There are three classes of lookers-on at the show of 
Nature who may be distinguished from each other. 
The first set includes the patient statisticians who ad- 
dict themselves to particular series of facts, such as 
those relating to temperature, to the course of storms, 
and other specific objects of study. They give us in- 
finite unreadable tables, out of which are extracted cer- 
tain average results, which we are all willing to make 
use of. The second consists of the natural observers, 
such people as White of Selborne, who love to wan- 
der in the fields and pick up all the interesting facts 
that come in their way, about swallows and moles, 
about bats and crickets and ancient tortoises, and big 
trees and early flowers and tall spikes of wheat or 
barley, and wonderful overflows and high winds ; 
charming people, a little miscellaneous in their gath- 
erings, but with eyes in their fingers, so that they spy 
out everything curious, and get hold of it as a magnet 
picks out iron filings. The third class contains the 
poets, who look at things mainly for their beauty or 
their symbolic uses. 



134 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

Everybody studies nature with tlie poets. Many 
take delight in the discursive observations of the ram- 
bling naturalist. A few interest themselves in the 
series of facts accumulated by the systematic observer. 
Read Wordsworth's or Bryant's poems, and you see 
how incidentally, economically, and fastidiously, yet 
how suggestively, and with what exquisite effect, they 
use the facts of observation. Read Miss Cooper's 
" Rural Hours," and you will get some hint of how 
full every walk in the country is of moving and still 
life, always changing its aspect, and always full of new 
delights when the eyes have once been opened. Pon- 
der the meteorological record of Dr. Holyoke, or the 
tables of M. Quetelet, and you will learn to wonder 
at the patience which can accumulate so many facts, 
each almost without interest by itself, but forming 
collectively the ground of conclusions which all are 
glad to accept, after they have been painfully elimi- 
nated by others. We must avail ourselves of the 
librettos of each of these three classes of observers, 
in following the performance from the first note of 
Spring to the last closing scene of Winter. 

January is our coldest month (average 25°. 59), and 
the other months follow in this order : February 
(27.75), December (30.29), March (35.38), Novem- 
ber (39.96), April (46.02), October (51.34), May 
(56.84), September (62.96), June (67.19), August 
(70.53), July (72.49). 

Dr. Holyoke's tables, from which these figures are 
taken, show the mean annual temperature of forty- 
three years at Salem to have been 47°. 09. The great- 
est heat was 101° ; the greatest cold, — 13°. They 
afford no evidence of any increasing warmth of the 
seasons, or any earlier opening of the spring. 



THE SEASONS. 135 

A warm day in December is a memory of October ; 
a warm day in February is a dream of April. Their 
character is unmistakable ; we cannot help going 
back in imagination with the one, and forward with 
the other. 

On the 14th of February the windows fill with pic- 
tures for the most part odious, and meant for some 
nondescript class of males and females, their allusions 
having reference to Saint Valentine's day, the legend- 
ary pairing time of the birds. The festival is a sad 
mockery, for there are no spring birds here to pair, 
but it reminds us that there is a good time coming. 
In a fortnight more March is upon us, with the roar 
of a lion very likely, for it is a windy, ill-tempered 
month. We say that spring has begun. So it has, 
according to our common reckoning, but the true as- 
tronomical spring does not begin until the 21st of 
March, the time of the vernal equinox. 

This seems the place to speak of the course of the 
sun, as we see it^ here in Boston, for instance. We 
learn from our books that the sun passes through the 
twelve signs of the zodiac, from the Ram to the Fishes, 
in the course of every year. But I appeal to you, 
candid and courageous reader, if we know anything 
of the kind from the evidence of our own senses, — 
whether we ever saw the God of Day in his alleged 
proximity to the Virgin, or in the (perhaps) more 
dangerous neighborhood of the Scorpion. How can 
we see the constellations while the sun is shining, I 
should like to know? 

All I can say of my own knowledge is, that near 
the end of December the sun is very low in the south 
at noon, and that he sets behind the hills of Brook- 
line ; that he gets higher and higher, and by and by 



136 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

sets behind Brighton, and then behind Cambridge, 
and near the end of June behind the hills north of 
Cambridge. I have no doubt the rising of the sun is 
adjusted to match his setting, but I do not assist at 
that ceremony so often as at the other. 

Now when the sun sets farthest to the south behind 
the Brookline hills, about the 22d of December, he 
pauses before he turns to go northward, and this is 
called the winter solstice^ or sun-halt. Then the day 
is shortest, and here winter begins. When the sun 
has got so far north that he sets behind the hills north 
of Cambridge, which is on the 21st of June, here 
again he pauses. This is the summer solstice, or sun- 
halt. The day is longest now, and the summer begins 
here. But on the 21st of March, midway between 
these two sun-halts, the day and night are of equal 
lengths (vernal equinox), and on the 22d of Septem- 
ber again day and night are equal (autumnal equi- 
nox). So that the true astronomical spring in this 
climate does not begin until the 21st of March, sum- 
mer the 21st of June, autumn the 22d of September, 
winter the 22d of December. 

It is not so very strange, then, that the good people 
living down in the District of Maine, as we used to 
call it, should talk about having six weeks' sleighing 
in March. I once had the pleasure of going from Au- 
gusta to Bangor in an open sleigh in one of their 
Marches, and thought I saw more snow than I had 
ever seen in all my life before. And I then noticed, 
what I never have heard mentioned, that the Maine 
snow had a faint bluish or greenish tinge, as if it was 
thinking of turning into a glacier, or rather a great 
mer de glace. We in Massachusetts do not expect 
more than a month's sleighing in March, — in fact not 



THE SEASONS. 137 

SO much as that ; but I think I remember hearing old 
Salem folks talk of a great snow-storm in a certain 
April many years ago, when two of their famous In- 
dia-men were wrecked off Cape Cod. If I am mis- 
taken, some of their centenarians will correct me. 

The last we see of snow is, in the language of a 
native poet, 

*' The lingering drift behind the shady wall." 

This is from a bard more celebrated once than now, 
Timothy Dwight, the same from whom we borrowed 
the piece we used to speak, beginning (as we said it), 

" Columby, Columby, to glory arise ! " 

The line with the drift in it has stuck in my memory 
like a feather in an old nest, and is all that remains to 
me of his " Greenfield Hill." 

When there is nothing left of the winter snow but 
these ridges behind the stone walls, and a dingy drift 
here and there in a hollow, or in the woods. Winter 
has virtually resigned the icicle which is his sceptre. 
It only remains to break the seals which are the war- 
rants of his hitherto undisputed reign. Of these the 
broadest and most important, in our region, is the 
frozen sheet that covers the Hudson Kiver. 

The worthy burghers of Albany take such interest 
in the arrival of the first boat of the season, that we 
find exact records of the day which marked this evi- 
dence of the opening of the river recorded for many 
years, like the first sight of land in a sailor's log-book. 
Before Mr. Fulton's vapor-boats began running, there 
were still records kept, more or less complete, so that 
the table before me goes back to 1786. It appears 
from the accounts of forty-seven seasons, that the Hud- 



138 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

son opened oftenest in March, about the 19th on the 
average ; on the 15th of March, no less than five times. 
But nine times it opened in February, and seven times 
so late as April. In 1842 it opened on the 4th of 
February ; and the next year, as if to show the im- 
partiality of Nature, not until the 13th of April. 
These were the earliest and latest periods in the time 
over which the record extends. 

The opening of the Kennebec has been noted dur- 
ing most of the seasons from 1785 to 1857. Its mean 
date was April 6th : earliest, March 15th ; latest, 
April 24th. 

In the mean time, while the inhabitants of Albany 
and Augusta are listening for the cracking and grind- 
ing of the breaking ice in their rivers, the Bostonians 
are looking out for the crocuses and the snow-drops in 
the Beacon Street front-yards. Boston is said to be 
in latitude 42° and something more, but Beacon 
Street is practically not higher than 40°, on account 
of its fine southern exposure. Not long after the 
pretty show of the crocuses has made the borders look 
gay behind the iron fences, a faint suspicion arises in 
the mind of the interested spectator that the brown 
grass on the banks of the Common and the terraces of 
the State-House is getting a little greenish. The 
change shows first in the creases and on the slopes, 
and one hardly knows whether it is fancy or not. 
There is also a spotty look about some of the naked 
trees that we had not noticed before, — yes, the buds 
are swelling. The breaking up of the ice on the Frog 
Pond ought to have been as carefully noted as that of 
the Hudson and Kennebec, but it seems to have been 
neglected by local observers. If anybod}^ would take 
the trouble to keep a record of the leafing and flower- 



THE SEASONS. 139 

ing of the trees on the Common, of the first coming of 
birds, of the day when the first schooner passes West 
Boston Bridge, it would add a great deal to the pleas- 
ure of our spring walks through the malls, and out to 
the learned city beyond the river, because dull isolated 
facts become interesting by comparison. But one 
must go to the country to find people who care enough 
about these matters, and who are constantly enough in 
the midst of the sights and sounds of the opening year 
to take cognizance of the order of that grand proces- 
sion, with March blowing his trumpet at the head of 
it, and April following with her green flag, and the 
rest coming in their turn, till February brings up the 
rear with his white banner. 

What are the first flowers of the spring ? Mr. Hig- 
ginson, whose charming article, " April Days," in the 
"Atlantic Monthly" for April, 1861, is full of fresh 
observations, claims that honor for the Epigcea repens 
(May-flower, or trailing arbutus) and the Hepatica 
triloba (liverwort, or blue anemone). He has found 
the last as early as the 17th of April, and the other 
appears at about the same time. But they have a less 
lovely rival in the field. " Towards the close of Feb- 
ruary or beginning of March the shunh-cahhage makes 
a good guess at the time of the year, and comes up in 
marshy spots, on the banks of ponds and streams." 
Miss Cooper tells us this, and speaks of it as the first 
plant to feel the influence of the changing season. 
The flower comes before the leaf, but it opens slowly. 
The little chickweed also, which flowered in Rochester 
on the 21st of March, puts in its claim. Near the end 
of this month, the alders throw out their tassels of 
purple and gold, which are soon followed by the crimson 
corymbs of the soft maple, the small brown flowers of 



140 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

the elms, and the yellow plumes of the willows. Who 
does not love to make a willow whistle, or to see one 
made ? Can you not recall your first lesson in the art, 
— the cutting of the flexible bough, the choosing a 
smooth part, passing the knife around it, above and 
below, pounding it judiciously, wringing it earnestly, 
and feeling the hollow cylinder of bark at last slipping 
on the sappy, ivory-white, fragrant wood ? That little 
plaything grew, with the growth of art and civilization, 
to be the great organ which thunders at Harlaem or in 
Boston. Respect the willow whistle. And near the 
willows, in the boggy, low ground, the sweet calamus 
used to wave its green blades in the wind. What boy 
does not remember flagroot^ with its biting aroma, 
and the marrowy base of the leaf, red shading into 
white, like the beak of a Java sparrow? These are 
the smells and tastes and sights that bring back boy- 
hood ! 

It was hardly fair in me to trouble so busy a man as 
my honored friend, President Hill, of Harvard College, 
for his experience in the woods and meadows. But I 
knew him to be so acute and enthusiastic an observer 
of nature, that I should be sure to be richly repaid for 
my aggression, if he could find a brief interval from 
grave duties to answer my questions. He sent me, in 
reply, a letter full of interest, with a poem written by 
himself long years ago, a reminiscence of his New Jer- 
sey birthplace. The reader must forgive me for not 
finding room for every word of his communication, 
from which I am happy to offer him the following ex- 
tracts : — 

"The earliest wild-flower that I remember is the 
witch-hazel, blooming at any time from October to 
March, when the weather is mild ; at least I have seen 



THE SEASONS. 141 

it near Newton Centre blossoming as late as February, 
sending tlirougli me a strange thrill of pleasure, and 
yet making me doubt whether to consider the mild 
February day a part of a late autumn or of an early 
spring. All the flower-buds, however, give a close ob- 
server somewhat of the same feeling. Nihil per sal- 
tum. I dare say that you may see on your Boston 
lindens, what I have often noticed on Cambridge elms, 
that the flower-buds gradually increase in size from the 
moment that they appear in the axils of the midsum- 
mer leaf, until they burst open to the delight of men 
and birds the next April. 

" I should put next to the witch-hazel, if my mem- 
ory is right, a beautiful plant, which, however, resents 
ill treatment and defends itself when attacked so suc- 
cessfully that it is usually let severely alone, and as- 
sailed from a distance mth ill names. But the Sym- 
plocarpus has no ' alliaceous ' nor ' mephitic ' odor, if 
it is not bruised, and its purple spathes in early March 
are very pleasant to my eye. I always bring a few 
home ; the odor is nothing in comparison with that of 
the root of the Crown Imperial, and this is admitted 
even in Beacon Street. 

" I begin after the skunk-cabbage to hesitate. Lo- 
calities differ ; here one plant has the sunny side of the 
rock or the pine grove, and there another. Even in- 
dividuals of the same species may differ in their for- 
wardness. Besides that, as we come towards May, the 
number of flowers increases so fast that there must of 
necessity be many whose time of bloom is on the aver- 
age the same. I have just counted on my fingers forty 
species of very common wild-flowers that come into 
bloom usually in the month of May, and probably 
could count up with a little more reflection fifty or 



142 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

sixty, without reckoning mosses or grasses, or going 
out of the list of familiar wild plants near Boston. 
The hazel and alder, with their tassels and their little 
glowing specks of red fire, I think, however, usually 
catch my eye next after the skunk-cabbage ; the cat- 
kins are of full size, though not open, even in winter. 
Then comes the hepatica, from the river's bank near 
Mount Auburn ; the saxifrage, on the edge of rocks ; 
and a little early buttercup on rocky hills, and equally 
bright yellow marsh-marigolds by the outlet of springs ; 
the elm and the maple give by their blossoms an inef- 
fable softness to the appearance of the forests ; the 
wood anemone (beautiful, but not so much so as the rue- 
leaved anemone, which comes later), the red columbine, 
wild violets, bloodroot, shad-flowers, and I cannot re- 
member what, crowd along, and May is here with its 
loveliness, and its music, (^and its terrible east winds.) 

"From 'The Mile Run Thirty Years Ago.' 

" First came, after the snow, early hepatieas, 
Pale blue, shrinking from sight; then the Claytonia, 
Bright spring beauty ; and red, honey-horned columbines ; 
Soon sprang, tender and frail, quamt little breeches-plant; 
With these, fairest of all, rue-leaved anemones. 

" Hillsides bordering the brook glowed with the beautiful 
May Phlox; while at the foot, under the alders, grew 
Dog-toothed violets, called otherwise adder's-tongue." 

As early as the first of March ground squirrels peep 
out of their holes, and bluebirds have sometimes also 
shown themselves. Robins make their appearance all 
the way from the first week in March to the first week 
in April. But some of them linger with us on winter 
half-pay through the cold season. Sparrows, black- 
birds, ground-birds, " phoebe-birds," wild pigeons, drop 



THE SEASONS. 143 

in during the month. A few flies, a grasshopper, a 
butterfly, a snake, a turtle, may be met with. 

A flock of wild geese wedging their way northward, 
with strange far-off clamor, are the heralds of April. 
In another week the frogs begin piping. Toads and 
tree-toads, martins and swallows, straggle along in 
through this month, or first make themselves seen or 
heard in May. 

The dandelions come into bloom with the arrival of 
the swallows. So says Mr. John Burroughs, a good 
observer, in the "Atlantic Monthly; " so it is in Bel- 
gium, according to M. Forster's table in one of Quete- 
let's Reports. 

The daffodils, which in England 

" Come before the swallow dares, and take 
The winds of March with beauty," 

blossomed at different places in the State of New York, 
in 1849, from April 5th to May 21st. Violets were 
in bloom in Albany as early as the 3d of April, but 
they are not commonly seen until later in the month. 
Mrs. Kemble flung some American violets from her 
because they were without fragrance. I remember 
treating the European white water-lily, which I found 
scentless^ with similar disrespect. 

The flowers are opening fast in the last part of 
April. Before May-day Mr. Higginson has found 
bloodroot, cowslip, Houstonia, saxifrage, dandelion, 
chickweed, cinquefoil, strawberry, mouse-ear, bellwort, 
dog's-tooth violet, five species of violet proper, to say 
nothing of some rarer plants than these. The leaves 
are springing bright green upon the currant-bushes ; 
dark, almost livid, upon the lilac ; the grass is grow- 
ing apace, the plants are coming up in the garden beds, 



144 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

slad the children are thinking of May-day, which will 
be upon them presently, as shrill as a step-mother, and 
make them shiver and shake in the raw wind, until 
their lips are as livid as the opening lilac-leaves. 

The birds come pouring in with May. Wrens, 
brown thrushes, the various kinds of swallows, orioles, 
cat-birds, golden robins, bobolinks, whippoorwills, 
cuckoos, yellow-birds, humming-birds, are busy in es- 
tablishing their new households. The old verse runs, 

^ " In May they lay, 

In June they tune, 
In July they fly." 

The bumblebee comes in with his "mellow, breezy 
bass," to swell the song of the busy minstrels. 

May is the flowering month of the orchard. As the 
warmth flows northward like a great wave, it covers 
the land with an ever-spreading flood of pink and white 
blossoms, — the flowers of the peach, the cherry, the 
apple, and other fruit-trees. 

Fifty years ago, Dr. Jacob Bigelow, whose, recent 
essay, " Modern Inquiries," has shown the active inter- 
est he takes in one of the leading questions of to-day, 
published a paper in the Transactions of the American 
Academy, which was the first attempt, so far as I 
know, at least in this country, to compare thp seasons 
by the flowering of plants. The progress of the wave 
of warm air is accurately recorded for the spring of 
1817 by the flowering of the peach. These are some 
of the dates, as he received them from his correspond- 
ents. Charleston, March 6-12 ; Richmond, March 
2 3- April 6 ; Baltimore, April 9 ; Philadelphia, April 
15; New York, April 21-26; Boston, May 9; Al- 
bany, May 12 ; Montreal, May 12. The peach was 
in bloom at Valencia, in Spain, about the 19th of 



THE SEASONS. 



145 



Marcli ; at Geneva, in Switzerland, on the 1st of April. 
The apple flowered ten days earlier near London (May 
8th) than in Boston (May 18th). 

The late Mr. John Lowell has given some results of 
his observations on the blooming of fruit-trees at Rox- 
bury, Mass., for a series of years, as follows : — 



Peach, Average for 14 years, May 2 

Cherry, Average 19 years, May 4 

Apple, Average 17 years, May 16 



Extremes, April 16, May 12. 
Extremes, April 21, May 17. 
Extremes, May 6, May 27. 



The average blooming of the apple in Mansfield, 
Mass., for forty years, was as here given : — 

First ten years. May 21st ; second ten years. May 
23d ; third ten years. May 20th ; fourth ten years. 
May 20th. Earliest, May 9th. Latest, June 2d. May 
1st is the earliest period I have seen noted in New 
England (Fayetteville, Yt., 1830). 

On the 23d of May, 1864, the day on which Haw- 
thorne was buried, the apple-trees were in full bloom 
in Concord, as if Nature had lavished all her wealth of 
flowers to do honor to one who had loved her so well. 

And now, to finish this group of figures, here is a 
table of the flowering of several common plants and 
trees in different years, on Hospital Hill, Worcester, 
Mass. 



Crocus . 
Bloodroot 
Cherry . 
Peach . 
Apple . 
Lilac 

Dandelion 
Horsechestnut 



1839. 



Apr. 8 
Apr. 18 
Apr. 28 
May 5 
May 10 
May 16 
Apr. 23 
May 20 



1840. 



1841. 



Apr. 1 
Apr. 19 May 
Apr. 25 1 May 15 
May 1 May 19 



May 11 
May 16 
Apr. 23 



May 24 
May 27 
May 1 



1842. 



Apr. 7 



Apr. 
Apr. 



1843. 



Apr. 16 



Apr. 15 
May 3 
May 9 
May 12 
May 14 
May 24 
May 9 
May 21 



1844. 



Apr. 
Apr. 
May 
May 
Apr. 



1845. 



Apr. 12 
Apr. 25 
Apr. 28 
May 1 
May 8 
May 15 
Apr. 23 
May 15 



1846« 



Apr. 9 
Apr. 12 
Apr. 24 
Apr. 25 
May 4 
May 8 
Apr. 19 



I cannot remember the time when the lilacs were 
not in blow on Election-day, — the last Wednesday in 



146 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

May. This year they were in their full glory on that 
day, the 29th. A bunch of " laylocks " and a 'lection 
bun used to make us happy in old times ; but 'lection- 
days are over, and we have no festival of the lilacs, 
which the old anniversary was, without knowing it. 
" Artillery Election," with its languid pageantry and 
its sermon ohligato^ is not to be counted. No more 
buns (at least with the old taste in them) ; no more 
" black joke," the " Aunt Sally " of the eocene period; 
no more egg-pop, made with eggs that would have 
been fighting cocks, to judge by the pugnacity the bev- 
erage containing their yolks developed, — the Frog 
Pond was said to furnish the water, and it smelt strong 
of the Medford still ; no more rings, and rough-and- 
tumble contests ; no more of that strange aroma, — 
giinpowdery, rummy, with stray whiffs of peppermint 
and checkerberry from candy-stalls, and ever and anon 
the redeeming fragrance from vast bunches of the 
ever-abounding lilacs, — which one of our true poets, 
Dr. T. W. Parsons, once skiKuUy analyzed ; — noth- 
ing left but the 4th of July, dull and decent, without 
even China crackers. 

The roses are getting ready to light up the glorious 
summer which is close upon us, and the yellow-birds 
have been flashing about for the last week and more ; 
and a few days ago, as if to remind us that even at the 
sweetest season our earth is no longer paradise, a mos- 
quito blew his little horn, and stabbed one of us with 
his poisoned dagger. To-morrow June will be here. 

As you have been pleased to follow me for a whole 
season, gentle reader, perhaps you will indulge me in 
a fragment of personal history, which may carry some- 
thing not unpleasing in its trivialities. One cannot 
gather some of the best fruits of life without climbing 



THE SEASONS. 147 

out to the end of the slender branches of the Ego. Of 
course there are those who pull up when they come to 
a great I, as a donkey stops at a post, — what then ? 
What have we better worth telling than our personal 
impressions of the great show at which we have been 
looking ever so many years? Besides, it is not the 
personal pronoun that is the essence of egotism ; no- 
body gets rid of himself, — did not Professor P. tell 
me that' there was a character of individual minds in 
mathematical works, so that Poisson's " Theorie du 
Calcul des Prcbabilites " had a distinct Poissonish, or 
fishy flavor running through the whole of it ? 

What I wish to tell you is how I reconstructed one 
of my early visions which had dissolved utterly away, 
and an incident or two connected therewith. 

How long ago was it, — Consule Jacobo Monrovio, 
— nay, even more desperate than that, Consule Ja- 
cobo Madisonio, — that I used to stray along the 
gravel walks of The Gakden ? It was a stately pleas- 
ure-place to me in those days. Since then my pupils 
have been stretched, like old India-rubber rings which 
have been used to hold one's female correspondence. 
It turns out, by adult measurement, to be an oblong 
square of moderate dimensions, say a hundred by two 
hundred feet. There were old lilac-bushes at the right 
of the entrance, and in the corner at the left that re- 
markable moral pear-tree, which gave me one of my 
first lessons in life. Its fruit never ripened, but al- 
ways rotted at the core just before it began to grow 
mellow. It was a vulgar plebeian specimen at best, 
and was set there no doubt only to preach its annual 
sermon, a sort of " Dudleian Lecture " by a country 
preacher of small parts. But in the northern border 
was a high-bred Saint Michael pear-tree, which taught 



148 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE, 

a lesson that all of gentle blood might take to heart ^ 
for its fruit used to get hard and dark, and break into 
unseemly cracks, so that when the lord of the harvest 
came for it, it was like those rich men's sons we see 
too often, who have never ripened, but only rusted, 
hardened, and shrunken. We had peaches, lovely 
nectarines, and sweet white grapes, growing and com- 
ing to kindly maturity in those days ; we should hardly 
expect them now, and yet there is no obvious' change 
of climate. As for the garden-beds, they were cared 
for by the Jonathan or Ephraim of the household, 
sometimes assisted by one Rule, a little old Scotch 
gardener with a stippled face and a lively temper. 
Nothing but old-fashioned flowers in them, — hya- 
cinths, pushing their green beaks through as soon as 
the snow was gone, or earlier; tulips, coming up in 
the shape of sugar " cockles," or cornucopise, — one 
was almost tempted to look to see whether nature had 
not packed one of those two-line " sentiments " we re- 
member so well in each of them; peonies, butting 
their way bluntly through the loosened earth ; flower- 
de-luces (so I will call them, not otherwise) ; lilies ; 
roses, damask, white, blush, cinnamon (these names 
served us then) ; larkspurs, lupins, and gorgeous hol- 
lyhocks. With these upper-class plants were blended, 
in republican fellowship, the useful vegetables of the 
working sort, — beets, handsome with dark red leaves ; 
carrots, with their elegant flligree foliage ; parsnips 
that cling to the earth like mandrakes ; radishes, il- 
lustrations of total depravity, a prey to every evil un- 
derground emissary of the powers of darkness ; onions, 
never easy until they are out of bed, so to speak, a 
communicative and companionable vegetable, with a 
real genius for soups ; squash- vines with their gener- 



THE SEASONS. 149 

ous fruits, the winter ones that will hang up " agin the 
chimbly" by and by, the summer ones, vase-like, as 
Hawthorne described them, with skins so white and 
delicate, when they are yet new-born, that one thinks 
of little sucking pigs turned vegetables, like Daphne 
into a laurel, and then of tender human infancy, which 
Charles Lamb's favorite so calls to mind ; — these, 
with melons, promising as " first scholars," but apt to 
put off ripening until the frost came and blasted their 
vines and leaves, as if it had been a shower of boil- 
ing water, were among the customary growths of The 
Garden. 

But Consuls Madisonius and Monrovius left the 
seat of office, and Consuls Johannes Quincius, and 
Andreas, and Martinus, and the rest, followed in their 
turn, until the good Abraham sat in the curule chair. 
In the mean time changes had been going on under 
our old gambrel roof, and The Garden had been suf- 
fered to relapse slowly into a state of wild nature. The 
haughty flower-de-luces, the curled hyacinths, the per- 
fumed roses, had yielded their place to suckers from 
locust-trees, to milkweed, burdock, plantain, sorrel, 
purslane ; the gravel walks, which were to Nature as 
rents in her green garment, had been gradually darned 
over with the million-threaded needles of her grasses, 
until nothing was left to show that a garden had been 
there. 

But The Garden still existed in my memory ; the 
walks were all mapped out there, and the place of 
every herb and flower was laid down as if on a chart. 

By that pattern I reconstructed The Garden, lost 
for a whole generation as much as Pompeii was lost, 
and in the consulate of our good Abraham it was once 
more as it had been in the days of my childhood. It 



150 PAGES PROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

was not much to look upon for a stranger ; but when 
the flowers came up in their old places, the effect on 
me was something like what the widow of Nain may 
have felt when her dead son rose on his bier and 
smiled upon her. 

Nature behaved admirably, and sent me back all 
the little tokens of her affection she had kept so long. 
The same delegates from the underground fauna ate 
up my early radishes ; I think I should have been dis- 
appointed if they had not. The same buff-colored 
bugs devoured my roses that I remembered of old. 
The aphis and the caterpillar and the squash-bug were 
cordial as ever, just as if nothing had happened to 
produce a coolness or entire forgetfulness between us. 
But the butterflies came back too, and the bees and 
the birds. 

The yellow-birds used to be very fond of some sun- 
flowers that grew close to the pear-tree with a moral. 
I remember their flitting about, golden in the golden 
light, over the golden flowers, as if they were flakes of 
curdled sunshine. Let us plant sunflowers, I said, 
and see whether the yellow-birds will not come back to 
them. Sure enough, the sunflowers had no sooner 
spread their disks, and begun to ripen their seeds, 
than the yellow-birds were once more twittering and 
fluttering about them. They love these oily grains ; 
a gentleman who raises a great many of the plants for 
the sake of the seeds tells me his man says he has to 
fight for them with the yellow-birds. 

SUMMER. 

June comes in with roses in her hand, but very 
often with a thick shawl on her shoulders, and a bad 
cold in her head. Fires are frequently needed in the 



THE SEASONS. 151 

first part of tlie month. Our late venerated medical 
patriarch, who left us with the summer wliich has just 
gone, used to tell his patients who were seeking a 
Southern climate for their health, to " follow the 
strawberries " northward, on their return. Thej com- 
monly come with us, the native ones, about the middle 
of June, and this year disappeared from the market 
after the 12th of July. Earlier than the middle of 
June there is too often reason to complain, as Willis 
once did on the 10th of that month, — 

" The weathercock has rusted east, 
The blue sky is forgotten, 
The earth 's a saturated sponge, 
And vegetation 's rotten." 

O that east wind ! Did it ever blow from that quar- 
ter in Eden ? I remember that often in my boyhood, 
the morning of an early summer-day would begin so 
soft and balmy that I began to think I was in Para- 
dise, and that the Charles was either Hiddekel or Eu- 
phrates. But in the course of the forenoon a change 
would have come over the air of my Eden. I did 
not know what the matter was, but the soft winds of 
morning seemed to be chilled all through ; they pinched 
instead of caressing, and all the sweet summer feeling 
seemed to have died out of the air. It was the east 
wind, which had sprung up in the forenoon, as it does 
almost daily at this season ; in Brookline one may see 
it before it has reached him, stealing landward from 
the edge of the bay, with a thin blue mist as its evi- 
dence. The hot days of July will soon be here, and 
then the east wind will be a grateful visitor. 

We have another June dispensation to remind us 
that we do not live in Paradise, namely, the canker- 
worm. In October great numbers of sluggish, slate- 



152 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OP LIFE. 

colored, wingless insects, accompanied by a very few 
winged moths, their males, may be seen crawling up 
the trunks of apple-trees and elms. About the middle 
of March another ascent begins, this time with a larger 
proportion of males. These are the fathers and moth= 
ers of the larvm we are speaking of, our canker-worms. 
Many contrivances are used to stop them, of which 
the best that I have tried so far is a broad band of 
roofing-paper made glutinous with a cheap kind of 
printer's ink, sold for the purpose. Every one of the 
vermin who tries to cross it finds it Styx. But there 
is good evidence that the winged males sometimes 
transport the females, as Orpheus did Eurydice, 
across the dark river, so that no tree can be insured 
against the more enterprising individuals. 

It is Excelsior always with these little wretches ; 
they will climb a lamp-post if there is nothing else to 
climb. About the time that the red currant is in 
blossom, that is, near the middle of May, the clusters 
of eggs which may have been laid on the twigs of the 
trees hatch, and send forth their young like so many 
Pandora's boxes. But we see little of them until a 
week or two later, and we never appreciate their full 
horrors until about the middle of June, when they 
begin to descend, at which time I have seen ladies 
coming in from Cambridge (which breeds them in 
great perfection) with their dresses festooned in living 
patterns with them. 

Why should I describe the carnival of the canker- 
worms, making the page crawl before you with the 
little green or brown omegas^ of which you have here 
the living portrait, bunching up their boneless backs, 
as drawn by Cadmus & Co., O O ? They come for a 
series of years, and then seem to die out, but return 



THE SEASONS. 153 

after a time. At the end of May, 1865, some of our 
orchards had not a single green leaf left. In 1866 
their ravages were frightful again ; but this year, 
1867, very few have been seen in the neighborhood of 
the Colleges. 

There is sport to be had in watching a race between 
a canker-worm and a common hairy tent-caterpillar. 
These last always seem to be in a dreadful hurry. 
(Miss Rossetti alludes to the furry caterpillar's haste, 
I remember, in one of her poems.) The contest is of 
the short, quick gait against the long stride, the short 
stroke against the long pull. I have found them so 
evenly matched, that to see them side by side was like 
looking at a trotting horse harnessed with a running 
mate. 

But now the roses are coming into bloom ; the aza- 
lea, wild honeysuckle, is sweetening the roadsides ; 
the laurels are beginning to blow ; the white lilies are 
getting ready to open ; the fireflies are seen now and 
then, flitting across the darkness ; the katydids, the 
grasshoppers, the crickets, make themselves heard ; 
the bullfrogs utter their tremendous voices, and the 
full chorus of birds makes the air vocal with its mel- 
ody. 

What is so pure, so cool, so chaste, so sweet as a 
pond-lily ? Few persons know that we have a water- 
lily which is not white, but red. It is found in at 
least one locality in this State, — Scudder's Pond, in 
the village of Centreville, in the town of Barnstable. 
These lilies are rare and valued ; Mr. John Owen 
tells me he paid a dollar for one which he procured 
for Professor Gray. 

At last come the strawberries, of which Walton 
quotes from Dr. Boteler the famous saying, " Doubt' 



154 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

less God could have made a better berry, but doubt- 
less God never did." When they have ripened in our 
own gardens, summer has begun, hardly till then; 
and they mark pretty nearly the true astronomical be- 
ginning of the season. The " strawberry festivals " 
which have become common of late years show the 
popularity of this first fruit of the summer. There 
will be found a number of natural anniversaries, if we 
look carefully for them. The blooming of the May- 
flower is the first ; then comes that of the lilacs on the 
last week of May, formerly a great holiday season in 
this State ; of the wild honeysuckle, azalea, Pinxter 
Blumejies of the New York Dutchmen, which was a 
feasting time for the negroes ; the strawberry season ; 
the great huckleberry-picking time ; the harvest, with 
its husking and its cattle-show ; and lastly Thanksgiv- 
ing, of which the ripe pumpkin is, as it were, the sun 
and centre in all societies that remember their New 
England origin. 

In July the wheat harvest begins in the State of 
New York, as early as the 4th, or as late as the lat- 
ter part of the month. In 1850 the bulk of the crop 
was cut by the 20th. The same year only a little 
wheat had been cut north of the middle of England 
on the 23d of August. July too is the great haying 
month. What a smell of rum there used to be all 
about in haying time when I was a boy ! It was 
stronger than the smell of the hay itself, very often. 
We of that generation used to associate cutting 
grass and cutting hair in an odd kind of way, — rum 
in the stomach to keep the heat from killing the 
mower, rum on the head to keep the cold from killing 
the child. 

The flowering meadows are so sweet during the 



THE SEASONS. 155 

first week of July that the ailanthus thinks it must 
try to do better. It tries, and fails ignominiously. 
In the fields the blue succory lights one or two blos- 
soms in its chandelier ; it is thrifty, and means to 
have its lamps last, not burn all out at once. [Still 
burning, end of September, 1867.] In the garden 
the stately hollyhock is practising the same economy. 
A few of the lower or middle buds have opened, and 
others will follow in succession for many weeks. Is 
anything more charming, in its way, than an old-fash- 
ioned single hollyhock, with its pink, or white, or yel- 
low, or purple flower, and the little pollen-powdered 
tree springing up from the bottom of the corolla ? A 
bee should be buzzing in it, for a bee is never so de- 
liciously pavilioned as in the bell tent of the holly- 
hock. This great, stately flower flourishes under our 
Northern skies, yet it is a native of the sultry East ; 
and in the stereograph before me of one of the most 
sacred spots in the Holy Land, I see it blossoming as 
to-day it is blossoming in my garden. None could 
mistake it, as its tall stem, with here and there a 
flower, rises by the side of those old gnarled olives in 
the Garden of Gethsemane. 

The Almanac-makers cannot agree about the exact 
period belonging to the dog-days. Some place it from 
July 3d to August 11th, others from July 24th to 
August 24th. The last agrees best with the popular 
impression. Many people dread the thunder-storms 
which often bring so much relief during the " heated 
terms." A real thunderbolt truly shot is a missile 
which the ancients might well have attributed to Jove. 
In 1850 one fell on a large oak, three feet in diameter, 
in Pequannock, Hartford County, Connecticut, with 
" an explosion louder than an hundred pieces of the 



156 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

heaviest ordnance." The trunk of the tree was 
shivered into small pieces, not one of them larger than 
a man could lift. Even the roots were scattered about ; 
many pieces were carried more than thirty rods ; some 
portions of the tree were crushed as fine as sawdust, 
and the fragments covered an area of eight or ten 
acres. I can believe this story from what I once saw 
myself, — a hemlock-tree, riven, splintered, shattered, 
and torn into ribbons by a stroke of lightning. A tree 
in the front yard of our old home at Cambridge was 
twice struck within my remembrance, — once when I 
was a child, again a few years since. The first stroke 
tore off a limb ; the second set the decayed interior on 
fire, and it was cut down. 

On the 22d of August, 1851, the great Tornado spun 
like a devil's humming-top through the towns of West 
Cambridge and Medford. The lower end of the in- 
verted cone, which moved in a northeasterly direction, 
swept all before it in a breadth of from forty to nearly 
eighty rods. It carried a freight car sixty feet away 
from the track. It took up Mrs. Caldwell and set her 
down, almost unharmed, a hundred and fifty feet from 
her starting-point. Its bill for damages was more 
than forty thousand dollars. 

The evenings grow cooler in August, but there is 
mischief abroad in the air. Heaven fills up fast with 
young angels in this month and in September. The 
unhealthiest months of the year, August and Septem- 
ber, are only separated by July from the healthiest, 
June. 

And now the cardinal-flower throws its image like a 
blood-stain into the stream by which it grows, — if I 
may borrow a verse, which none has a better right 
to, — 



THE SEASONS. 157 

" As if some wounded eagle's breast, 
Slow tlirobbing o'er the plain, 
Had left its airy path impressed 
In drops of scarlet rain." 

And now too the huckleberries are ripe. O for a 
huckleberry pasture to wander in, with labyrinths of 
taller bushes, with bayberry-leaves at hand to pluck 
and press and smell at, and sweet-fern, its fragrant 
rival, growing near ! Such a huckleberry pasture 
there used to be in my young days on the right of the 
Broadway track as you go from Boston, a little before 
you reach the Colleges. In Pittsfield I missed the 
huckleberry, the bayberry, the sweet-fern, the barberry. 
At least there were none near my residence, so far as I 
knew. But we had blackberries in great number, the 
high-bush kind. I wonder if others have observed 
what an imitative fruit it is. I have tasted the straw- 
berry, the pine-apple, and I do not know hoAV many 
other flavors in it, — if you think a little, and have 
read Darwin and Huxley, perhaps you will believe 
that it and all the fruits it tastes of may have come 
from a common progenitor. 

The buckwheat fields are in blossom now, the sec- 
ond week of August, — white flowers on reddish stems, 
— a sea of foam over a forest of corals. " Fragrant," 
says kind-hearted Miss Cooper. O infinite, uncon- 
querable charity of woman's heart! O sweet, inex- 
haustible affluence of woman's caressing words ! Fra- 
grant ! — Is Dobbin dead ? And not yet under the 
daisies ? It is high time he was ! 

No, — Dobbin, I am happy to learn, is well, and 
thrashing flies in the pasture, — but the buckwheat field 
in blossom. Let us go to the windward of it. The 
bees appear to like it mightily, — it is all alive with 



158 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

them. They seem peculiar in their tastes, — they 
made a hive of the carcass of Samson's lion, you re- 
member, and will breed of themselves in that of a bul- 
lock, according to Virgil. I can understand the at- 
traction a field of buckwheat has for them. 

The cows are standing mid-leg deep in the pool, 
their tails going with rhythmical regularity, looking as 
we often want to feel, vacant of thought, which chases 
us like lo's gad-fly, meekly unquestioning, accepting 
life as a finality. For the lower creatures are limited 
but absolute affirmations, while man is an infinite 
question. What is its answer ? 

Pe-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-ing I replies the locust from 
the tree overhead. That is what he told Adam, and 
he has learned nothing since. How many have under- 
taken to answer the question who had nothing better 
to say ! Who darkened this world with mystery to 
the only creature capable of understanding it ? 

" Katy did^ she did ! " answers a pale green grass- 
hopper. Thou liest, insect ! Eve did ; and the snake 
that tempted her shall eat thee for saying the thing 
that is not ! 

In the last week of August used to fall Commence- 
ment day at Cambridge. I remember that week well, 
for something happened to me once at that time, 
namely, I was born. Commencement was a great oc- 
casion all through my boyhood. It has died away 
into next to nothing, in virtue of the growth of the 
republican principle. Its observances emanated from 
the higher authorities of the College. " Class day," 
which has killed it, is a triumph of universal suffrage 
over divine right. 

But what a time it was for us young Cantabrigians, 
born under the shadow of the Collea^e walls ! It was 



THE SEASONS. 159 

a holiday for Boston as well as Cambridge, and what 
we cared for was the glitter of the cavalcade, the 
menagerie, and other shows, and above all the great 
encamjDment which overspread the Common, where 
feasting and dancing, much drinking, and some gam- 
bling used to go on with the approving consent of the 
Selectmen, — such was the license of the " good old 
times." But the year had nothing for us boys like 
" the tents." Tuesday night was to us like the even- 
ing before Agincourt. We heard the hammers late in 
the evening, we heard them early in the morning, as 
we looked out of the west window to see if " the tents" 
were going to spread over as wide a surface as in other 
remembered years. The sun crawled slowly up the 
sky, like a golden tortoise, — how long a day was then ! 
At last the blare of a trumpet ! The Governor was 
coming, guarded by his terrible light-horse troop, pro- 
tected too by his faithful band of mounted truckmen 
from Boston, sturdy men on massive steeds, in white 
frocks, all, a noble show of broad shoulders and stout 
arms. 

Let those who will go into the old yellow meeting- 
house to hear the " parts " spoken ; for us rather the 
gay festivities of the booths and the stands, where the 
sovereigns are enjoying their royal feast, as they have 
done since the time when they used to be ferried over 
the river and come round by CharlestowUc Behold ! 
Store of pork and beans ; mountainous hams, thick- 
starred with cloves all over their powdery surface ; the 
round of beef ; the dainty chicken for the town ladies 
who sit fanning themselves on benches beneath the 
dingy sail-cloth awnings. Nor be forgotten the pie 
of various contents, the satisfying doughnut, nor the 
ginger-cake, hot in the mouth. The sad oyster sum< 



160 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

moned untimely, for there is no r in August properly 
spelled, lies naked in the sunny saucer, waiting to be 
swooped up by undiscriminating rustics, to whom the 
salt-sea mollusk in his most demoralized condition is 
always the chief est of luxuries. The confectioner is 
there with his brass scales, and Richard Gunn, — O 
my coevals, remnants of yourselves, do you remember 
Richard Gunn and his wonderful toys, with the in- 
scription over them, awe-inspiring as that we recollect 
so well in the mighty Tuscan's poem ? 

" Look, but handle not ! " 

The fair plain, not then, as now, cut up into cattle-pens 
by the ugliest of known fences, swarmed with the joy- 
ous crowds. The ginger-beer carts rang their bells 
and popped their bottles, the fiddlers played Money 
Musk over and over and over, the sailors danced the 
double-shuffle, the gentlemen from the city capered in 
lusty jigs, the town ladies, even, took a part in the 
graceful exercise, the confectioners rattled red and 
white sugar-plums, long sticks of candy, sugar and 
burnt almonds into their brass scales, the wedges of 
pie were driven into splitting mouths, the mountains 
of ham were cut down as Fort Hill is being sliced 
to-day ; the hungry feeders sat, still and concentrated, 
about the boards where the grosser viands were served, 
while the milk flowed from cracking cocoa-nuts, the 
fragrant muskmelons were cloven into new-moon cres- 
cents, and the great watermelons showed their cool 
pulps sparkling and roseate as the dewy fingers of Au- 
rora. Then and there I saw my first tiger, also Joseph 
Ridley the fat boy, and a veritable Punch and Judy, 
whom I would willingly have stayed to see repeating 
their performances from morning to night. 



THE SEASOl^S. 161 

It was the end of August, you remember, and the 
peaches were ripe, and the early apples and pears, and, 
chief among the fruits of the season, that bounteous 
one which a College poet thus celebrated in the year 
1811 : — 

" The smaller melons go for each one's need, 
The children have them, or they go to seed; 
But this great melon waits Commencement day, 
Momits the tall cart, to Cambridge takes its way; 
There, proud conclusion of its happy days, 
A graduate's palate murmurs forth its praise." 

So sung Edward Everett, Senior Sophister, aged seven- 
teen. 

The Common was not spacious enough for the mul- 
titude. The old churchyard was often invaded and 
its flat tombstones were taken possession of by small 
parties as tables for their banquets. The proud Vas- 
sal tablet was a favorite board for the revellers, and 
many a melon gaped and scattered its seeds over its 
brown freestone. Many a group feasted and laughed 
around the slab where the virtues of a deceased Presi- 
dent were embodied in Latin which might have fright- 
ened the bravest Roman, but which threw away its 
terrors upon them. 

Thus the summer used to die out in a blaze of glory 
for us, the boys of Cambridge, in the first quarter of 
this present century. 

AUTUMN. 

The saddest days of the year have not yet come, but 
the golden-rod and the aster have been long in bloom 
on the hill and in the wood and by the roadside. The 
birds have been already consulting about their depar- 
ture for the South. The foliage has been losing its 



162 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

freshness through the month of August, and here and 
there a yellow leaf shows itself like the first gray hair 
amidst the locks of a beauty who has seen one season 
too many. The evenings have become decidedly cooler 
than those of midsummer. The whole temperature of 
the day begins to fall rapidly now, for September is 
about eight degrees cooler, on the average, than August, 
and four or five degrees cooler than June. 

The year is getting to feel rich, for his golden fruits 
are ripening fast, and he has a large balance in the 
barns, which are his banks. The members of his fam- 
ily have found out that he is well to do in the world. 
September is dressing herself in showy dahlias and 
splendid marigolds and starry zinnias. October, the 
extravagant sister, has ordered an immense amount of 
the most gorgeous forest tapestry for her grand re- 
ception. 

In the midst of their prosperity a blow falls on the 
family in the shape of the first frost. The earliest in 
thirty-two years, at Waltham, Massachusetts, was on 
the 7th of September ; the latest day to which it was 
put off, the 18th of October. The morning-glories, 
the running vines, the tomato plants, the more suc- 
culent flowering annuals, feel the first frost, droop, 
shrivel, blacken, and are dead henceforth to the sweet 
morning sunshine and the cool evening dew. But the 
surviving plants put on no mourning, and the brilliant 
dresses which have been ordered must be worn. 
Something like this, it is said, has been occasionally 
seen in spheres of being higher than the vegetable 
circle. 

About — this — time — that — is — all — along — 
until — it — comes — if — it — comes — at — all, (I 
speak after the manner of my good old friend The Far- 



THE SEASONS. 163 

mer's Almanac,) look out for the storm called " The 
Equinoctial." 

Do you know, dear reader, that I can remember the 
great September gale of 1815, as if it had blown yes- 
terday ? What do you think is really (independently 
of all imaginative poetical statements) the first image 
which presents itself to my recollection at this moment, 
connected with the September gale ? Boys are boys, 
and apples are apples. I can see the large Rhode 
Island greenings, promise of many a coming banquet, 
strewed under the tree that used to stand in The Gar- 
den, — these are what I am really thinking of. They 
lie strewed about on the floor of my memory at this 
very instant of time, just as they lay beneath the tree 
on the 23d of September, 1815. It was an awful 
blow. Began from the east, got round to the south- 
east, at last to the south, — we have had heavy blows 
from that quarter since then, as you suggest with your 
natural pleasant smile. It tore great ehns up by the 
roots in the Boston Mall, and in the row Mr. Paddock 
planted by the Granary Burial-ground. What was 
very suggestive, the English elms were the chief suf- 
ferers. The American ones, slenderer and more yield- 
ing, renewed the old experience of the willows by the 
side of the oaks. 

The wind caught up the waters of the bay and of the 
river Charles, as mad shrews tear the hair from each 
other's heads. The salt spray was carried far inland, 
and left its crystals on the windows of farm-houses and 
villas. I have, besides more specific recollections, a 
general remaining impression of a mighty howling, 
roaring, banging, and crashing, with much running 
about, and loud screaming of orders for sudden taking 
in of all sail about the premises, and battening down 



164 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

of everything that could flap or fly away. The top- 
railing of our old gambrel-roofed house could not be 
taken in, and it tried an aeronautic excursion, as I re- 
member. Dreadful stories came in from scared peo- 
ple that managed somehow to blow into harbor in our 
mansion. Barns had been unroofed, " chimbleys " 
overthrown, and there was an awful story of somebody 
taken up by the wind, and slammed against something 
with the effect of staving in his ribs, — fearful to think 
of ! It was hard travelling that day. Professor Far- 
rar tried with others to reach the river, but they were 
frequently driven back, and had to screen themselves 
behind fences and trees, or tach against the mighty 
blast, which drove them back like a powerful current 
of water. 

Boston escaped the calamity of having a high tide 
in conjunction with the violence of the gale, but Prov- 
idence was haK drowned, the flood rising twelve or 
fourteen feet above high-water mark. 

It is something to have seen or felt or heard the 
great September gale ; I embalmed some of my fresher 
recollections of it in a copy of verses which some of 
my readers may have seen. I am afraid there is some- 
thing of what we may call indulgently negatwe veracity 
in that youtliful effusion. But the greenings are a 
genuine reminiscence, — there they are, lying all about 
on the floor of my memory, just as the day they were 
blown off. Time will never pick them up until he 
picks me up, still carrying with me the recollection of 
the Rhode Island greenings. 

Two autumnal wonders have been much written 
about, and never yet reached, — the change of the 
forest leaves and the Indian summer. The beautiful 



THE SEASONS. 165 

colors of the leaves are often ascribed to the effects of 
frost, but it is well known that they show themselves 
before there has been any frost. Some have attrib- 
uted them to the oxidation or acidification of the color- 
ing matter, chlorophyl ; but the reason why American 
woods should be so much more brilliant in the autumn 
than those of the Old World is not obvious. 

The Virginia creeper is the first to change ; aftei 
that follow the maples. Miss Cooper speaks of " yel- 
low years " in distinction from those in which scarlet, 
crimson, pink, and dark red prevail. Some trees, she 
says, are red one year and yellow another. Many oaks 
and maples, sumachs, dogwood, the Virginia creeper, 
show different shades of red ; other oaks and maples, 
elms, lindens, chestnuts, poplars, birches, beeches, their 
several special tints of yellow. I have seen maples 
that looked like yellow flames, and others that were 
incarnadined as if they had been dyed in blood. The 
sugar-maples of the Berkshire woods were not so bril- 
liant as the soft maples of this neighborhood. One 
curious effect I have often noticed in the first half of 
October, namely, the dark patches and belts on the hill- 
sides, where the deep green hemlocks showed amidst 
the pale and fading deciduous trees ; a month earlier 
their masses of foliage run into each other without 
abrupt transition. 

In October, or early in November, after the " equi- 
noctial " storms, comes the Indian summer. It is the 
time to be in the woods or on the sea-shore, — a sweet 
season that should be given to lonely walks, to stum- 
bling about in old churchyards, plucking on the way 
the aromatic silvery herb everlasting, and smelling at 
its dry flower until it etherizes the soul into aimless 
reveries outside of space and time. There is little 



166 PAGES PROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

need of trying to paint the still, warm, misty, dreamy 
Indian summer in words ; there are many states that 
have no articulate vocabulary, and are only to be re- 
produced by music, and the mood this season produces 
is of that nature. By and by, when the white man is 
thoroughly Indianized (if he can bear the process), 
some native Haydn will perhaps turn the Indian sum- 
mer into the loveliest andante of the new " Creation." 
This is the season for old churchyards, as I was say- 
ing in the last paragraph. The Boston ones have been 
ruined by uprooting and transplanting the gravestones. 
But the old Cambridge burial-ground is yet inviolate ; 
as are the one in the edge of Watertown, beyond 
Mount Auburn, and the most interesting in some re- 
spects of all, that at Dorchester, where they show great 
stones laid on the early graves to keep the wolves from 
acting like hyenas. I make a pilgrimage to it from 
time to time to see that little Submit sleeps in peace, 
and read the tender lines that soothed the heart of the 
Pilgrim mother two hundred years ago and more : — 

" Submit submitted to her heavenly king 
Being a flower of that seternal spring, 
Neare 3 yeares old she dyed in heaven to waite 
The yeare was sixteen hundred 48." 

Who are the unknown poets that write the epitaphs 
which sometimes startle us by their pathos or their 
force ? Who wrote that on Martin Elginbrodde ? I 
saw it first in one of Greorge Macdonald's stories, but 
it is to be found in an Edinburgh churchyard, and in 
a little different form it is to be seen on a tombstone 
in Germany, as we are told in the ^'Harvard Lyceum " 
(1811), from which I quoted Mr. Everett's lines. If 
you have not read the epitaph, it may give you a sen- 
sation. Here is George Macdonald's version : — 



/ 



THE SEASONS. 167 

" Here lie I, Martin Elgiiibrodde, 
Have mercy on my soul, Lord God, 
As I would do, were I Lord God, 
An' ye were Martin Elginbrodde." 

" Eldenbrode " is the name as spelt on the Edmburgh 
tombstone. Mount Auburn wants a century to hallow 
it, but is beginning to soften with time a little. Many 
of us remember it as yet unbroken by the spade, before 
Miss Hannah Adams went and lay down there under 
the turf, alone^ — " first tenant of Mount Auburn." 
The thunder-storms do not frighten the poor little 
woman now as they used to in those early days when 
I remember her among the living. There are many 
names of those whom we have loved and honored on 
the marbles of that fair cemetery. One of whom I 
know nothing has an epitaph which arrested me, — 
four words only : — 

" She was so pleasant ! " 

If you are at the sea-shore during the lovely autum- 
nal days, you feel it to be the season of all others to 
believe in the wonders and mysteries and superstitions 
of the ocean, to see the mer-maiden on the rocks by 
day, and the phantom ship on the wave by night, — 
to 

" Have sight of Proteus coming from the sea, 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

O, if one could but see the sea-serpent, just once, 
but perfectly plain, so as to tell of it all his days! 
Head up, as big as a horse's (a horse's mane, too, some 
say), seventy or a hundred feet long, body as large 
round as a half -barrel, — so thought Lonson Nash, Es- 
quire, Justice of the Peace in Gloucester, Massachu- 
setts, who saw it through a perspective-glass in the 



168 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

year 1817. You don't believe there is any such snake 
or sea beast ? How do you know that it is not the old 
Zeuglodon, as some have thought ? Are you prepared 
to affirm positively that it is not a kind of secondary 
enaliosaurian, or an elongated cetacean? A great 
naturalist thinks it may be one of those old tertiary 
monsters come to light again. 

A little bewildering, the idea of those old fossilized 
animals having living descendants still about ! What 
if one should shoot at an unknown flying creature and 
bring down, say a pterodactyl, — a bird-like reptile, 
with sixteen-f eet spread of wings ? Mr. Gosse argues 
for the existence of the sea-serpent. That is against 
the chance of there being such a living creature ; for 
Mr. Gosse is the sage who maintains that fossil skele- 
tons with food inside of them may be make-believes, 
that is, never alive at all, but made skeletons just as if 
they had once been breathing animals, — a thing in- 
credible to be told of any sane man, if he had not put 
it in a book. 

The Indian corn is ripe, beautiful from the day it 
sprung out of the ground to the time of husking. 
First a little fountain of green blades, then a minia- 
ture sugar-cane, by and by lifting its stately spikes at 
the summit, alive with tremulous pendent anthers, then 
throwing out its green silken threads, each leading to 
the germ of a kernel, promise of the milky ear, at last 
offering the perfect product, so exquisitely enfolded by 
Nature, outwardly in a coarse wrapper, then in sub- 
stantial paper-like series of layers, then in a tissue as 
soft and dainty as a fairy's most intimate garment, and 
under this the white even rows, which are to harden 
into pearly, golden, or ruby grains, and be the food of 
half a continent. 



THE SEASONS. 169 

" Comin' thro' the rye " is well, when the traveller 
meets good company ; but comin' through the corn- 
field, where the stalks are eight or ten feet, nay, if a 
field of broom-corn, twelve or fifteen feet high, is like 
threading a trackless forest, and a meeting there is a 
real adventure. It is astonishing to see what substance 
there is to this wood of three or four months' growth. 
I was in the corn-field at Antietam on the Sunday after 
the great battle ; and though some of the fiercest fight- 
ing was done there, the corn-stalks were left standing 
very generally, as if they had been trees. 

The lighter grains have long been reaped and gar- 
nered : now harvest the yellow corn, tumble the great 
pumpkins, looking like oranges from Brobdingnag, into 
the wagons, . and dig the potatoes. There is a mild 
excitement about potato-digging ; every hill is a lot- 
tery, the size and number of its contents uncertain ; 
and Nature's homely miracle, the multiplication of the 
^ye loaves, — for a potato is a loaf of unbaked bread, 
the.real bread-fruit of the temperate climates, — is one 
of the most pleasing of her wonder-working perform- 
ances. 

As the air grows colder, the long wedges of geese 
flying south, with their " commodore " in advance, and 
honhing as they fly, are seen high up in the heavens, 
where 

" Yainly tlie fowler's eye 
Might mark their distant flight to do them wrong." 

These were noticed October 1st, 13th, 27th, in differ- 
ent years, and wild ducks October 10th. [Geese seen 
flying south this morning. " Transcript," September 
9th, 1867.] 

And now the clouds shake out their first loose snow- 
flakes, sometimes seen only in the air, and never whit- 



170 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ening the ground at all, but dissolving before they 
reach it. The earliest date at which snow was seen 
at Waltham, in the course of thirty-two years, was on 
the 13th of October, in 1837 ; the latest date of the 
first snow, the 7th of December, in 1815. At Bruns- 
wick, Maine, snow fell on the 26th of September in 
the year 1808. [A few snow-flakes falling with rain^ 
Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 30, 1867.] 

The winding - sheet of summer is weaving in the 
roaring loom of the storm-clouds. The trees are being 
stripped of their garments ; naked they came into the 
season, and naked they must go out of it. It is time 
to be getting ready for Thanksgiving. 

Our honest Puritan festival is spreading, not, as 
formerly, as a kind of opposition Christmas, but as a 
welcome prelude and adjunct, a brief interval of good 
cheer and social rejoicing, heralding the longer season 
of feasting and rest from labor in the month that fol- 
lows. Note the curious parallelism so often seen be- 
tween New World ways and things and Old World 
ones. For the boar's head substitute the turkey. For 
the plum-pudding, the pumpkin-pie. For the Christ- 
mas-box, the contribution-box. 

The services used to be longer on Thanksgiving day 
than any single one on an ordinary Sunday, but they 
were not encored,, according to the " custom of the 
weekly exercise. I think we boys bore them better 
than the stated dispensations. The sermon had a cer- 
tain comforting, though subdued cheerfulness running 
through it, and the anthem and the handing round the 
contribution-boxes took up a good deal of time. O 
that Thanksgiving anthem ! We used to have a chor- 
ister who labored under various aerial obstructions, an 
exterminating warfare with which served as the ordi- 



THE SEASONS. 171 

nary overture to every musical performance. We also 
had a bass-viol, whicli used to indulge in certain rasp- 
ing grunts and taurine bellowings, which, had a mar- 
vellous effect in whetting the appetite for what was 
coming. These preliminary sounds got oddly mixed 
up with sacred music in my recollections, and espe- 
cially as preludes to the great anthem. I wonder if 
Nathaniel Munroe has any sweeter notes in heaven 
than those delicate falsetto warblings that he used to 
charm us with, while he was with us here below ! 

If you ask my honest opinion, I will tell you I be- 
lieve that many of us young reprobates, instead of fol- 
lowing the good minister through his convincing proofs 
of the propriety of gratitude for the blessings of the 
year, were thinking of boiled turkey and oyster-sauce, 
roast ditto with accompaniments, plum-puddings, pump- 
kin-pies, apples, oranges, almonds, and shagbarks. It 
seems a rather low valuation of our spiritual condition, 
perhaps ; but remember that Thanksgiving comes only 
once a year, and sermons come twice a week. 

What is left of autumn after Thanksgiving is like 
the goose from which breast and legs have been carved, 
— of which Zachary Porter, deceased, sometime land- 
lord of the inn by the side of the road that leads to 
Menotomy, discoursed to us on that memorable even- 
ing when we founded the " Atlantic Monthly Maga- 
zine," since known to many. 

Thanksgiving is the winding up of autumn. The 
leaves are off the trees, except here and there on a 
beech or an oak ; there is nothing left on the boughs 
but a few nuts and empty birds' nests. The earth 
looks desolate, and it will be a comfort to have the 
snow on the ground, and to hear the merry jingle of 
the sleigh-bells. 



172 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

"Sleigh-bells," " sliagbarks," "pumpkin-pie." These 
belong to the New World vocabulary. It is a great 
misfortune to us of the more elderly sort, that we were 
bred to the constant use of words in English children's 
books, which were without meaning for us and only 
mystified us. 

We were educated, you remember (I am speaking 
to grandpapas now), on Miss Edgeworth's "Frank" 
and "Parents' Assistant," on "Original Poems" and 
" Evenings at Home " and " Cheap Kepository Tracts." 
There we found ourselves in a strange world, where 
James was called Jem, not e/im, as we always heard it ; 
where a respectable but healthy young woman was 
spoken of as "a stout wench ; " where boys played at 
taw^ not marbles ; where one found cowslips in the 
fields, while what we saw were buttercups; where 
naughty school-boys got through a gap in the hedge, 
to steal Farmer Giles's red-streaks, instead of shinning 
over the fence to hook old Daddy Jones's Baldwins ; 
where Hodge used to go to the alehouse for his mug 
of beer, while we used to see old Joe steering for the 
grocery to get his glass of rum ; where toffy and lolly- 
pop were the substitutes for molasses-candy and gibral- 
tars ; where poachers were pulled up before the squire 
for knocking down hares, while our country boys hunted 
(with guns) after rabbits, or set figgery-f ours for them, 
without fear of the constable ; where birds were taken 
with a wonderful substance they called bird-lime ; 
where boys studied in forms, and where there were 
fags, and ushers, and barrings-out ; where there were 
shepherds, and gypsies, and tinkers, and orange-women, 
who sold China oranges out of barrows ; where there 
were larks and nightingales, instead of yellow-birds 
and bobolinks ; where the robin was a little domestic 



THE SEASONS. 173 

bird that fed at the table, instead of a great fidgety, 
jerky, whooping thrush; where poor people lived in 
thatched cottages, instead of shingled ten-footers ; 
where the tables were made of deal, where every vil- 
lage had its parson and clerk and beadle, its green- 
grocer, its apothecary who visited the sick, and its 
bar-maid who served out ale. 

What a - mess, — there is no better word for it, — 
what a mess was made of it in our young minds in the 
attempt to reconcile what we read about with what we 
saw ! It was like putting a picture of Regent's Park 
in one side of a stereoscope, and a picture of Boston 
Common on the other, and trying to make one of 
them. The end was that we all grew up with a men- 
tal squint which we could never get rid of. We saw 
the lark and the cowslip and the rest on the printed 
page with one eye, — the bobolink and the buttercup 
and so on with the other in nature. This world is 
always a riddle to us at best, — for the answer see 
our next, — but those English children's books seemed 
so perfectly simple and natural, — as they were to 
English children, — and yet were so alien to our 
youthful experiences, that the Houyhnhnm primer 
could not have muddled our intellects more hope- 
lessly. 

But here comes Winter, savage as when he met the 
Pilgrims at Plymouth, Indian all over, his staff a 
naked splintery hemlock, his robe torn from the backs 
of bears and bisons, and fringed with wampum of rat- 
tling icicles, turning the ground he treads to ringing 
iron, and, like a mighty sower, casting his snow far 
and wide, over all hills and valleys and plains. 



174 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

WINTER. 

It seems rather odd that winter does not fairly 
begin until the sun has turned the corner, and is every 
day shining higher and higher, in fact bringing sum- 
mer to us as fast as he can. But the astronomical 
date corresponds with the popular belief as well as the 
meteorological record, " As the day lengthens, the cold 
strengthens." We do not commonly feel that Winter 
is thoroughly in earnest until after the Christmas holi- 
days, which include the 1st of January. And inas- 
much as on the 14th of February our thoughts are 
led, by the ingenious fiction of St. Yalentine's day, to 
look forward henceforth to spring, which is at hand, 
we may say that the white pith, or marrow, of winter 
lies locked up in the six weeks between these two 
festivals. 

It has been snowing all day and all night. Your 
cook cannot open the back door when the milkman 
conies, — two hours late, pulling his legs up at every 
step, as if he was lifting posts out of their holes. 

In the course of the day you venture a mild remark 
to an oldish friend from the country, that a good deal 
of snow has fallen. 

" Call this a deep snow, do y' ? Y' ought t' h' 
seen one o' them real old-fashioned snow-storms, sech 
as we uset t' hev wen I w'z a boy. Up t' th' secon'- 
story windahs, — don't hev no sech snow-storms now- 
a-days." 

Something like the above has not improbably been 
heard from bucolic or other lips by some of my read- 
ers. The illusion is very common ; perhaps they share 
it with their rural friend. It is an illusion. They 
were not so tall then as now, and to a child of three 



TELE SEASONS. 175 

feet a five-foot drift is as high as a ten-foot one to Si, 
well-grown man. Of course, if you hunt the records 
back to the time of the settlement of the country, you 
will very probably find a mammoth snow-storm some- 
where, and the chance manifestly is that the biggest 
of two hundred years and more will not have been in 
your time but before it. In the year 1717 they did in- 
deed have a real old-fashioned snow-storm, the ground 
covered from ten to twenty feet, houses quite buried, 
as Thoreau mentions that an Indian discovered a cot- 
tage beneath a drift, by the hole which the heat from 
the chimney had melted, — just as I remember it is 
told that Elizabeth Woodcock's breath (you recollect 
the story of her being buried a week under the snow) 
had melted a conical or funnel-like hole, leading from 
her mouth to the surface of the snow over her. 

But only last winter (1866-67) we had what might 
be called a very respectable snow - storm ; a drift 
reached to the window-sill of the second story of the 
house next to my old Cambridge birth-place. That 
will be an old-fashioned snow-storm for people in 1900. 
Nature is more uniform than we think ; I am tempted 
to read the often-quoted line, 

" Tempora non mutantur, sed nos mutamur in illis.'^ 

Snow-storms used to be more dreaded in the country 
than in the city, but since we pile our edifices so high, 
the avalanches from the roofs are a perpetual source 
of danger and anxiety. 

The average number of snowy days in a season is 
thirty, the extremes varying from nineteen to fifty, ac- 
cording to Professor Cleaveland's record of fifty-two 
years, kept at Brunswick, Maine. 

Here is a tabular view of the snow-storms in Bos- 



176 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ton for tlie last twenty-four years, taken from the 
" Transcript," and dated June 19, 1867. 



Years. 


Number of Storms. 


Depth of 


Snow. 


1843-44 


44 


7 feet 71 


inches. 


1844-45 


36 


3 


" 3 


a 


1845-46 


27 


3 


" 7 


a 


1846-47 


32 


2 


" 8 


(( 


1847-48 


27 


2 


« 1 


(I 


1848-49 


27 


3 


« 1 


« 


1849-50 


33 


2 


«11 


« 


1850-51 


28 


3 


« 1 


« 


1851-52 


38 


6 


" 81 


« 


1852-53 


20 


3 


" 2 


(I 


1853-54 


24 


7 


" If 


ii 


1854-55 


35 


3 


" 7| 


(( 


1855-56 


28 


4 


" 5 


« 


1856-57 


32 


6 


« 2 


(( 


1857-58 


14 


2 


"11 


« 


1858^9 


23 


4 


" h 


(( 


1859-60 


24 


3 


" 2| 


(C 


1860-61 


34 


6 


" 6^ 


i( 


1861-62 


35 


5 


" 4 


(I 


1862-63 


25 


4 


a 


1863-64 


26 


2 


" 5 


a 


1864-65 


32 


3 


" ^ 


(I 


1865-66 


23 


3 


2 


iC 


1866-67 


25 


5 


" 91 


a 



The whole number of snow-storms in Boston for 
the past twenty-four years is six hundred and ninety- 
two ; depth of snow during the same period, one hun- 
dred feet seven and three eighths inches. 

The average number of snow-storms during the 
above period (twenty-four years) was a fraction less 
than twenty-nine ; and the average depth of snow is 
about four feet and one half inch. 

And here is a record from the same paper of the 
snow of the past season in Boston. 

" The first snow-storm was on the 23d day of No- 



THE SEASONS. 177 

vember, 1866, at which period sufficient snow fell to 
make the ground white ; and the succeeding ones were 
as follows : November 25, ground white ; December 
16, 3 inches; 17th, ^ inch; 20th, i inch; 27th, 1 
inch ; and 31st, S^ inches ; January 1, 1867, 2 inches ; 
6th, 4 inches ; 12th, ground white ; 17th, 21 inches 
(severest snow-storm experienced in Boston for many 
years) ; 21st, 6 inches ; and 26th ^ inch ; February 
4, ground white ; 20th, Ih inches ; 21, 4:^ inches ; and 
23d, I inch ; March 3d and 4th, 5 inches ; 7th, 4 
inches ; 10th, ground white ; 12th, little snow ; 16th 
and 17th, 12 inches ; April 24, little snow. Total 
number of storms, 25. Depth of snow, 5 feet 9^ 
inches." 

Next in interest to the snow-storm come the " cold 
snap " and the " January thaw." Mr. Meriam, the 
weather-wise man of Brooklyn, has attempted to show 
that the cold snaps, as we commonly call them, are 
governed by a law which he explains as follows. A 
circle representing three hundred and sixty hours is 
divided into eight parts of forty-five degrees each. 
The cold " cycle," as he calls it, may last through one 
or two or more of these divisions, that is, forty-five 
hours or ninety, or a hundred and thirty-five, and so 
on up to three hundred and fifteen hours, or three 
hundred and sixty. He finds an average of between 
five and six of these cold cycles in a winter. Whether 
this is fanciful or not, these paroxysms of cold alter- 
nating with milder temperatures are familiar facts. 

February 8, 1861, is said to have been the coldest 
day in this region for thirty-seven years. The ther- 
mometer fell to from 12° to 20° below zero in Boston, 
and from 22° to 30° in the neighboring towns. Dis- 
agreeable surprises are common when the temperature 



178 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

is of this quality, or approaches it. I met a young' 
lady one very cold day a winter or two ago, who looked 
blooming, except that a snow-white stripe ran directly 
down from the centre of the tip of her nose between 
the nostrils, to the upper lip. She was beginning to 
freeze along the middle line of the face, where the 
blood-vessels are smallest. You may know it is a cold 
day when you see people clapping their hands to their 
ears, and hoisting their shoulders and running. I see 
them on the long West Boston Bridge every winter 
from my warm home at the river's edge in Boston, 
— I am afraid with that wicked pleasure Lucretius 
speaks of. 

The " January thaw " brings the avalanches men- 
tioned above^ the discomfiture of sleighing parties, the 
destruction of skating, horrible streets, odious with the 
accumulations which the melting snow uncovers, and a 
corresponding demoralization of the human race. Then 
comes the cold day, with the slippery sidewalks, and 
broken arms and legs, or at least constant anxiety to 
avoid getting them, so that between the snow-slides 
from the roofs and the danger of tumbling, there is no 
peace in walking during a good part of the winter. 
One cannot think his own thoughts while he has to 
keep looking up, ready to jump, or looking down, ready 
to save himself, and all the w^hile his eyes aching with 
the glare of the snow. 

The official seal of winter, as before said, is the 
closing of the Hudson River. In 1798 it closed on the 
23d of November ; in 1790 and in 1802 not until the 
3d of February. These were the earliest and latest 
dates in a record of more than fifty years. The closure 
happened in December forty-five times, in November 
eight times, in February twice. Until the seal of win- 



THE SEASONS. 179 

ter is broken, the movements of life are all, as it were, 
under protest, and only in virtue of artificial con- 
ditions, — close shelter, thick clothing, household fireSo 
Between the last dandelion and violet, — they have 
been found in December, — and the first spring blos- 
som which lifts the snow in its calyx, there is a frozen 
interregnum in the vegetable world, save for the lif e-in- 
death of the solemn evergreens, the pines and firs and 
spruces. Yet there is a proper winter life which de- 
fies the snow and the cold. 

In the animal world there is always something stir- 
ring. A considerable number of birds are permanent 
residents with us. Mr. Cabot mentions the crow, the 
blue-jay, the chickadee, the partridge, and the quail, 
and perhaps some hawks and owls. The gulls are well- 
known winter residents to all of us who live near the 
mouth of the Charles. Some bluebirds and robins 
linger with us through the winter, and the snow-bird 
and snow-bunting, the sparrow, the wren, the nuthatch, 
and the cross-bill, are more or less frequent visitors. 

Those who have 3^oung orchards know too well that 
mice will gnaw them under cover of the winter snow. 
Squirrels and foxes, the large and smaller hares which 
we call rabbits, the mink, and the musquash, are awake 
and active through the winter. 

All these manage to live through the desperate cold 
and the famine-breeding snow ; liow^ let Mr. Emer- 
son's " Titmouse " — as charming a bird as has talked 
since the days of ^sop — tell us from his expe= 



rience 



" For well the soul, if stout within, 
Can arm inipregnably the skin; 
And polar frost my frame defied, 
Made of the air that blows outside." 



180 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

The moral of the poem is as heroic as the verse is ex- 
quisite ; but we must not forget the non-conducting 
quality of fur and feathers, and remember, if we are at 
all delicate, to go 

" Wrapped in our virtue, and a good surtout," 

by way of additional security. Even Thoreau recog- 
nizes the necessity of clothing and a shelter for the 
human being in this climate, though he says, as if to 
show that the last is of the nature of a luxury, " There 
are instances of men having done without it for long 
periods, in colder countries than this." 

The most rudimentary form of shelter is the screen 
the fisherman puts up on the ice to keep off the wind. 
A wall without a roof to keep off the winter's blast, — 
a roof without a wall to shield from the summer sun ; 
here are the beginnings of domestic architecture. 

Those screens of sail-cloth fastened to two poles, 
which I see every winter from my parlor windows, re- 
call the old delight of boyish days, in fishing through 
the ice. It was not sport of a lofty order, but it had 
a pleasure in it for unsophisticated youth, to whom the 
trout was an unknown animal, and the fly a curious 
thing to read about in " The Complete Angler." This 
is, or was, the order of winter fishing. 

Your tackle shall be a heavy sinker, with a wire 
running through it, with a hook suspended to each end 
of the wire. The end of your line shall be fastened 
to one end of a haff-parenthesis of wooden hoop ), the 
other being thrust into a hole just at the edge of the 
opening in the ice through which you fish. Your bait 
is a most ill-favored, flat, fringed, naked worm, dug 
out of the mud of the river-bank. 

Plump go sinker and baited hooks through the ob= 



THE SEASONS. 181 

long square opening, down, down, until the line hangs 
straight from the end of the curved elastic hoop. Pres- 
ently bob goes the hoop, — bob, — bob, — bob, — bob- 
b-b-b-b ! Pull up, pull up ! Oo ! Oo ! how cold ! 

There is your prize, a tomcod, or Tomcodus^ as 
Cuvier has it, and a meaner little fish never rewarded 
an angler. Two thousand bushels of them used to be 
taken annually at Watertown, — in nets of course, — 
and sold to the wretched inhabitants of the neighbor- 
ing city. 

Try once more. Ah ! there you have a couple of 
smelts on your hooks. That will do, — the smelt is a 
gentleman's fish ; the other is of ignoble style and des- 
tiny. I cannot make this river fishing as poetical as 
Thoreau has made pickerel fishing on Walden, yet it 
is not without its attractions. The crunching of the 
ice at the edges of the river as the tide rises and 
falls, the little cluster of tent-like screens on the frozen 
desert, the excitement of watching the springy hoops, 
the mystery of drawing up life from silent unseen 
depths, and the rivalry with neighboring fishermen, are 
pleasant recollections enough to account for the pains 
taken often with small result. But fishing is an emo- 
tional and not a commercial employment. There is 
our West Boston Bridge, which I rake with my opera- 
glass from my window, which I have been in the habit 
of crossing since the time when the tall masts of 
schooners and sloops at the Cambridge end of it used 
to frighten me, being a very little child. Year after 
year the boys and the men, black and white, may be 
seen fishing over its rails, as hopefully as if the river 
were full of salmon. At certain seasons there will be 
now and then captured a youthful and inexperienced 
codfish, always, so far as I have observed, of quite triv- 



182 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ial dimensions. The fame of the exploit has no 
sooner gone abroad, than the enthusiasts of the art 
come flocking down to the river and cast their lines in 
side by side, until they look like a row of harp-strings 
for number. That a codfish is once in a while caught 
I have asserted to be a fact ; but I have often watched 
the anglers, and do not remember ever seeing one 
drawn from the water, or even any unequivocal symp- 
tom of a bite. The spiny sculpin and the flabby, 
muddy flounder are the common rewards of the an- 
gler's toil. Do you happen to know these fish ? 

With all its inconveniences, winter is a cheerful 
season to people who are in comfortable circumstances 
and have open fire-places. A house without these is 
like a face without eyes, and that never smiles. I have 
seen respectability and amiability grouped over the 
air-tight stove ; I have seen virtue and intelligence 
hovering over the register ; but I have never seen true 
happiness in a family circle where the faces were not 
illuminated by the blaze of an open fire-place. 

In one of those European children's books which we 
used to read was a pleasant story which, next to " Eyes 
and No Eyes," I remember with most gratitude of all 
those that carried a moral with them. The boy of 
whom it tells is discovered sporting among the daisies 
and cowslips and lambkins. He takes out his tablets 
(why did n't American boys carry tablets ? why did n't 
/ have tablets ?) and writes, " Oh that it were always 
Spring! " By and by enters luxurious Summer with 
her full-blown glories, and out come the precious tab- 
lets again to receive the inscription, " Oh that it were 
always Summer ! " The harvest moon shines at length, 
bringing with it the ripe fulness of the year, including 



THE SEASONS. 183 

the fruits of the orchard and garden ; which so pleases 
the young gentleman with the tablets, that he writes 
once more, " Oh that it were always Autumn ! " And 
at last, when the ice is thick enough to slide upon, and 
there is snow enough to make a snow-ball, and the cold 
has made him ruddy and lively, this forgetful young 
person lugs out his tablets for the fourth time and 
writes thereon, " Oh that it were always Winter ! " 

I am sure I got a healthy optimism out of that story 
which has lasted me to this day. But for grown peo- 
ple there is nothing that makes the seasons and the 
year so interesting as to watch and especially to keep 
record of the changes by which Nature marks the ebb 
and flow of the great ocean of sunshine which over^ 
spreads the earth. I have thrown together a few dis- 
cursive hints ; but if you wish to go a little farther, 
read White of Selborne, the pattern of local observ- 
ers ; follow Miss Cooper in her most interesting walks 
from March to February; squat with Thoreau in his 
hovel by the side of Walden ; ramble with keen-eyed 
Mr. Higginson among the flowers of April ; listen to 
Mr. Cabot's admirably told story of " Our Birds and 
their Ways ; " enjoy the enthusiastic descriptions of 
Mr. John Burroughs expatiating among the songsters, 
and marvel at Mr. Wilson Flagg's rendering of their 
notes in musical characters, — the last four writers all 
to be found in the " Atlantic Monthly." Search through 
the thirty-two volumes of the " American Almanac," 
for records of the flowering of trees, — taking care not 
to overlook Professor Lovering's learned article on Me- 
teorology in the thirty-second volume (for 1861). Un- 
earth the contribution of Dr. Bigelow, and the meteor- 
ological tables of Dr. Holyoke, buried in the quartos of 
the American Academy, and get Professor Cleaveland's 



184 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

weather-history of fifty-two years, published by the 
Smithsonian Institution. And do not neglect to seek 
out the Reports of the Regents of the University of New 
York, full of detailed accounts of the seasons in differ- 
ent parts of that State through a long series of years. 
If you would institute comparisons with Europe, you 
can begin with Quetelet's series of observations on the 
leafing and flowering of plants in the Memoirs of the 
Royal Academy of Belgium. By the time you have 
ransacked these books, you will have got on the track 
of others, and will have learned that here is room for 
a most fascinating labor in a branch of knowledge that 
comes home to our every-day life, — the construction 
of a natural calendar for different latitudes, which 
shall be to our common almanac columns of months 
what the natural system of Jussieu is to the artificial 
arrangement of Linnseus. 

And so, my fellow-spectator at the great show of the 
Four Seasons, I wish you a pleasant seat through the 
performances, and that you may see as many repeti- 
tions of the same as it is good for you to witness, which 
I doubt not will be arranged for you by the Manager 
of the Exhibition. After a time you will notice that 
the light fatigues the eyes, so that by degrees they 
grow dim, and the ear becomes a little dull to the 
music, and possibly you may find yourself somewhat 
weary, — for many of the seats are very far from being 
well cushioned, and not a few find their bones aching 
after they have seen the white drop-curtain lifted and 
let down a certain number of times. There are no 
checks given you as you pass out, by which you can 
return to the place you have left. But we are told that 
there is another exhibition to follow, in which the seen- 



THE SEASONS. 185 

ery will be far lovelier, and tlie music infinitely sweeter, 
and to which will be asked many who have sat on the 
hard benches, and a few who have been in the gilded 
boxes at this preliminary show. Dear reader, who hast 
followed me so graciously through this poor programme 
of the fleeting performance, I thank thee for thy cour- 
tesy, and let me venture to hope that we shall both be 
admitted to that better entertainment, and that thou 
and I may be seated not far from each other ! 



VI. 



TALK CONCERNING THE HUMAN BODY AND ETS 
MANAGEMENT." 

It is no new thing for an almanac to deal with the 
various branches of medical science. The signs of the 
zodiac have long been supposed to have their corre- 
sponding divisions in the human body. 

In the old treatise before me, dated 1522, the twelve 
symbols marking the course of the sun through the 
heavens are represented as grouped on and about a 
full-length male figure. The Ram is seated on the 
top of the head ; the Bull upon the neck ; the Twins 
slant gracefully upward, reclining along the two ex- 
tended arms ; the Lion stands in front of the heart ; 
while the Virgin, to whose charge we should have as- 
signed that organ, presides over the less sentimental 
domain of the stomach. So through the several signs 
and the related regions of the body, until we reach 
the feet, where the Water-bearer, Aquarius, empties 
his vase over the Dolphins who represent the Fishes 
of February. 

The same fanciful doctrine survives to our own time, 
and may be found in almanacs of the present year, and 
particularly in one which is slipped imder our door- 
steps by a philanthropist who sells pills and potions, 
that he may obtain the means to give away his in- 
" First printed in the Atlantic Almanac. 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 187 

structive calendars, — unless it may be supposed that 
he gives them away that he may sell more pills and 
potions. 

Almanacs, too, are very commonly repositories o£ 
medical information in the form of recipes and gra- 
tuitous advice of ail sorts, so that the reader need not 
think it a strange innovation when he finds by the side 
of agricultural and horticultural admonitions, or in 
place of them, some talk about the tree of human life, 
which, like its vegetable brothers and sisters, must be 
well cared for, or it will not flourish and bloom, but 
which, unlike them, never grows after it is replanted 
in the soil from which it was taken. 



I. 

FIXED CONDITIONS. 

We will begin our talk with a few words on Ani- 
mal Chemistry. 

Take one of these boiled eggs, which has been rav- 
ished from a brilliant possible future, and instead of 
sacrificing it to a common appetite, devote it to the 
nobler hunger for knowledge. You know that the 
effect of boiling has been to harden it, and that if a 
little overdone it becomes quite firm in texture, the 
change pervading both the white and the yolk. Care- 
ful observation shows that this change takes place at 
about 150° of Fahrenheit's thermometer. — The sub- 
stance which thus hardens or coagulates is called 
alhumen. As this forms the bulk of the Qgg^ it must 
be the raw material of the future chicken. There is 
some oil, with a little coloring matter, and there is the 



188 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

earthy shell, with a thin skin lining it ; but all these 
are in small quantity compared to the albumen. You 
see then that an egg contains substances which may be 
coagulated into your breakfast by hot water, or into a 
chicken by the milder prolonged warmth of the moth- 
er's body. 

We can push the analysis further without any lab- 
oratory other than our breakfast-room. 

At the larger end of the egg, as you may have no- 
ticed on breaking it, is a small space containing noth- 
ing but air, a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, as you 
know. If you use a silver spoon in eating an egg, it 
becomes discolored, as you may have observed, which 
is one of the familiar effects of sulphur. It is this 
which gives a neglected egg its peculiar aggressive at- 
mospheric effects. Heat the whole contents of the 
shell, or, for convenience, a small portion of them, 
gently for a while, and you will have left nothing but 
a thin scale, representing only a small fraction of the 
original weight of the contents before drying. That 
which has been driven off is water, as you may easily 
see by letting the steam condense on a cold surface. 
But water, as you remember, consists of oxygen and 
hydrogen. Now lay this dried scale on the shovel and 
burn it until it turns black. What you have on the 
shovel is animal charcoal or carhon. If you burn this 
black crust to ashes, a chemist will, on examining 
these ashes, find for you small quantities of various 
salts, containing phosphorus, chlorine, potash, soda, 
magnesia, in various combinations, and a little iron. 
You can burn the egg-shell and see for yourself that 
it becomes changed into lime, the heat driving off the 
carbonic acid which made it a carbonate. 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 189 



Oxygeno 


Iron. 


Hydrogen. 


Potash. 


Carbon. 


Soda. 


Nitrogen. 


Magnesia. 


Sulphur. 


Phosphorus, 


Lime. 


Chlorine. 



This is the list of simple elements to be found in an 
egg. You have detected six of them by your fireside 
chemistry ; the others must be in very small quan- 
tity, as they are all contained in the pinch of ashes 
which remains after you have burned all that is com- 
bustible in your egg. 

Now this egg is going, or rather was going, to be- 
come a chicken ; that is, an animal with flesh and 
blood and bones, with a brain and nerves, with eyes 
ready to see and ears ready to hear, with organs all 
ready to go to work, and a voice ready to be heard 
the moment it is let out of its shell. The elements of 
the egg have been separated and recombined, but noth- 
ing has been added to them except what may have 
passed through the shell. Just these twelve elements 
are to be found in the chicken, no more, no less. 

Just these same twelve elements, with the merest 
traces of two or three other substances, make up the 
human body. Expende Hannihalem; weigh the great 
general, the great thinker, his frame also may be re- 
solved into a breath of air, a wave of water, a charred 
cinder, a fragment of lime-salts, and a few grains of 
mineral and saline matter which the earth has lent 
him, all easily reducible to the material forms enumer- 
ated in this brief catalogue. 

All these simple substances which make up the egg^ 
the chicken, the human body, are found in the air, the 



190 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

water, or the earth. All living things borrow their 
whole bodies from inanimate matter, directly or indi- 
rectly. But of the simple substances found in nature, 
not more than a quarter, or something less than that, 
are found in the most complex living body. The 
forty-five or fifty others have no business in our organ- 
ization. Thus we must have iron in our blood, but we 
must not have lead in it, or we shall be liable to colic 
and palsy. Gold and silver are very well in our pock- 
ets, but have no place in our system. Most of us have 
seen one or more unfortunates whose skins were per- 
manently stained of a dark bluish tint in consequence 
of the prolonged use of a preparation of silver which 
has often been prescribed for the cure of epilepsy. 

This, then, is the great fact of animal chemistry ; a 
few simple substances, borrowed from the surrounding 
elements, give us the albumen and oil and other con- 
stituents of the egg, and, arranging themselves differ- 
ently during the process of incubation, form all the 
tissues of the animal' body. 

Can we come at any statement as simple and satis- 
factory with reference to the anatomy of the animal 
body ? That will depend upon the kind of anatomy 
we wish to know something of. 

The body may be studied as the geographer studies 
the earth, or as the geologist studies it. A surgeon who 
is to operate upon any part must make a very careful 
study of its geography. A very slight deviation of 
his knife may be the death of his patient. There is 
no short and easy method of getting at an intimate 
knowledge of the particular arrangements of all the 
different organs of the body. But most persons have 
picked up some idea of the position and general char- 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 191 

acters of the most important among tliem. They have 
seen Yorick's skull in the hands of Hamlet, and the 
same object with the crossbones on monuments or in 
pictures. They have even a notion of the whole skel- 
eton, derived, perhaps, from the New England Primer^ 
or Hans Holbein's Dance of Death. The aches of 
childhood taught them where their alimentary canal 
belongs, and the palpitations of adolescence fixed the 
situation of the heart. A smattering of phrenology 
has given them a notion of the brain. The ballet has 
made them full learned enough in the anatomy of the 
leg ; and if they have ever swung a dumb-bell or 
pulled an oar, they can hardly have remained ignorant 
of the form and connections of such muscles as the 
biceps and the pectoral. Everybody knows the artery 
which beats at the wrist and gives the pulse, the veins 
that stand out on the arm or hand, the nerve that is 
numbed by a blow on the elbow. In short, most per- 
sons have a tolerable conception of the geography of 
the body, and do not care to go through the tedious 
and uninviting details which most medical men master 
more or less imperfectly, to forget in great measure as 
soon as they become engaged in practice. 

But the geology of the body, the list of anatomical 
elements into which the microscope easily resolves it, 
is quite another matter. Of this most unprofessional 
persons know absolutely nothing, yet it is full of in- 
terest, and made plain enough with the greatest ease 
to any one who will give a few hours to its study under 
the guidance of an intelligent student who has a micro- 
scope of moderate power, and knows how to use it on 
the objects required, which are obtained with great 
ease, and have nothing to excite repugnance, if for no 
other reason, because they are employed in almost in- 
finitesimal quantities. 



192 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

A slight prick of the finger with a cambric-needle 
supplies a point, not a drop, of blood, which we spread 
on a slip of glass, cover with another much thinner 
piece of glass, and look at in the microscope. You 
see a vast number of flattened disks rolling round in 
a clear fluid, or piled in columns like rouleaux of coin. 
Each of these is about one fiftieth of the diameter of 
the dot over this i, or the period at the end of this 
sentence, as it will be seen in fine print. You have 
many millions of millions of them circulating in your 
body, — I am almost afraid to say how many by cal- 
culation. Here and there is a pearly looking globule, 
a little larger than one of the disks. These are the 
red and the white blood corpuscles, which are carried 
along by the pale fluid to which the red ones give its 
color, as the grains of sand are whirled along with a 
rapid torrent. The blood, then, you see, is not like 
red ink, but more like water with red and white cur- 
rants, one of the latter to some hundreds of the 
former, floating in it, not dissolved in it. 

The solids of the body are made up chiefly of cells 
or particles originally rounded, often more or less 
altered in form, or of fibres. Here is a minute scrap 
of fat, half as large as the head of a pin, perhaps. 
You see in the microscope that it consists of a group 
of little vesicles or cells, looking like miniature soap- 
bubbles. They are large, comparatively, — eight of 
them in a row would stretch across the dot of the i 
which it took fifty blood disks to span. That part of 
the brain with which we think is made up of cells of a 
different aspect. They are granular, instead of being 
clear like the f atrcells. Each of them has a spot upon 
it called its nucleus, and that has a smaller spot, called 
the nucleolus. Turn down your lower lip and scrape 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS M ANAGEMEJJ"^ . 193 

it very lightly with the blade of a pocket-knife. Ex- 
amine what it removes, on the slip of glass, as before. 
Here is a cell again, with its nucleus and nucleolus, 
but the whole flattened out, so that the spot looks like 
the boss of a shield. All the internal surfaces of the 
body are lined with altered cells like these, except 
that some are not flattened, but round or elongated, 
and that in some internal passages, as in the air-tubes 
of the lungs, they have little hair-like appendages 
called cilia^ which keep moving all the time by some 
unknown power of their own. Here is a shred from 
an oyster just opened ; you see a row of cilia in a per- 
petual ripple like that of a field of grain in a light 
breeze. Once more, here is a little slice of cartilage 
from the joint we are to see on the dinner-table by and 
by. Cells again, spotted or nucleated cells, scattered 
like plums in a pudding through a solid substance 
which has no particular structure, so far as we can 
see, but looks like ground glass. 

Now let us examine some fibres. These fine, wavy 
threads are the material employed by nature for a 
larger variety of purposes than any other anatomical 
element. They look like silk floss as you see them 
here. But they take many aspects. Made into bands 
and cords, they tie the joints as ligaments, and form 
the attachments of muscles as tendons. Woven into 
dense membranes, they wrap the limbs in firm envel- 
opes, sheathing each separate muscle, and binding the 
whole muscles of a part in a common covering. 
Shaped into stout bags, they furnish protections for 
the brain, the heart, the eye, and other organs. In 
looser masses, they form the packing of all the deli- 
cate machinery of life, separating the parts from each 
other, and yet uniting them as a whole, much as the 



194 PAOES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

cement at once separates and unites the stones or 
bricks of a wall, or more nearly as the cotton-wool 
packs the fragile articles it is used to protect. 

These other fibres, coarser, curling at the ends like 
the tendrils of a vine, are used to form many of the 
elastic parts of the animal machine. They are em- 
ployed as labor-saving contrivances where parts that 
have been displaced are to be restored, just as india- 
rubber bands are used to shut doors after us. A stout 
bundle of them stretches along the back of an ox's 
neck, and helps to lift his head after he has done graz- 
ing. All our arteries are rendered elastic by a coat- 
ing of these fibres. 

On the point of this pin is a particle of red flesh 
from the sirloin which is to be on our table. The 
microscopic threads of which our instrument shows it 
is made up are exactly like those which form all our 
own muscles, the organs of all our voluntary acts of 
motion and of speech. See how every one of them is 
crossed by closely set, cobweb-like lines, as if it were a 
ladder for invisible monads to climb upon. These 
striped filaments are the servants of the brain. To 
each bundle of them runs a nervous telegraphic cord, 
which compels it to every act good or bad which it 
does, to every word right or wrong which it utters. 
Your muscles will murder as readily as they will em- 
brace a fellow-creature. They will curse as willingly 
as they will bless, if your brain telegraphs them to do 
it. Your red flesh has no more conscience or compas- 
sion than a tiger's or a hyena's. 

But here we have taken up on the point of the pin, 
and placed on the glass slide, a scarcely visible frag- 
ment from another familiar form of flesh known as 
tripe, which, as you are probably aware, is the pre- 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 195 

pared stomach of tlie animal wMcli furnished your sir- 
loin. If it is not on your own list of delicacies, you 
may remember that Katharine was not too proud to 
beg for it in the '' Taming of the Shrew." The stom- 
ach can move, as the facts of every day, not to speak 
of more convincing nautical experiences, have prob- 
ably convinced you. But like other internal parts, it 
will neither move nor be quiet at your bidding. And 
in correspondence with this difference in its endow- 
ments, this entire independence of the will in contrast 
wdth the complete submission to it of the outer mus- 
cles, such as those of the limbs, you will notice a dif- 
ference of structure at the first glance. The involun- 
tary muscular fibre has not the delicate transverse 
stripes of the voluntary. It is made up of separate 
spindle-shaped threads, spliced, as it were, to each 
other. 

We want a bit of nerve to look at in the microscope. 
We can get that very easily at the provision stall where 
we get our dinners, and have found our specimens so 
far, but there is a mischievous schoolboy in the house 
who has, without meaning it, become the purveyor of 
science. Nature has organized one of her creatures so 
admirably for the purposes of the physiologist that Mr. 
Bergh himself would hardly deny that there was a 
meaning in it. One cannot help thinking what a fes- 
tival of science the Plague of Frogs must have been 
to the Brown-Sequards of the time of Moses. That 
luckless animal, which has storks and mice and snakes 
and anglers an4 boys as its natural enemies, displays 
some of its nerves so beautifully and liberally on the 
most superficial anatomical inspection, that it becomes 
in consequence of this indiscreet exposure a foredoomed 
and necessary victim of experiment. Our schoolboy 



196 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

has just brought home what he calls a " Bull-paddy," 
which he has slain with a stone after the manner of 
boys of ^sop's day, and ours and all days. From this 
victim we have snipped off this little piece of nerve, 
looking like a bit of white thread. It seems at first as 
if it were simply fibrous, but examining it in the mi- 
croscope we see that each fibre is a tube, with thick 
walls and a kind of pith in its centre, — looking some- 
thing like a thermometer-tube with transparent con- 
tents. Through these canals flows in the knowledge 
of all that is outside of ourselves, nay, of our own 
bodies, to our consciousness, which has its seat in those 
granular, spotted cells of the brain before mentioned. 
Through these stream forth, also, from the brain-cells, 
the mandates of the will. 

These are the anatomical elements of the soft parts 
of the animal body, — of our own frames. The bones 
are more than half mineral substance, lime being their 
basis. Our earthly house of this tabernacle is built 
upon a rock. The teeth are still more largely mineral 
in their composition, yet both bones and teeth are pene- 
trated by canals which carry nourishment through their 
substance. A very thin cross-section of the arm or 
leg bone shows a network of little tubules radiating 
from a round hole, which is one of the larger canals 
seen cut transversely. The arrangement reminds one 
of a spider's web. A similar section of a tooth shows 
that it is penetrated by tubes that radiate from the 
pulp cavity, and which appear to contain delicate ex- 
tensions of the pulp, — which fact sufficiently accounts 
for the lively sensations attending the filling of a 
tooth. 

Blood corpuscles, red and wliite. 

Cells, round; flattened; elongated; provided with cilia. 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 197 

Fibres, { Fine, wavy, — (connective tissue, etc.) 

(passive) \ Coarse, curly, — (elastic tissue.) 

Fibres, ( Striped muscle, — (voluntary.) 

(active) ( Unstriped muscle, — (involuntary.) 

Fibres ") 

/^ J ' x- \ r Tubular, forming the nerves. 

(conductmg) j ' ^ 

Hard tissues. — Bone. Teeth. 

Fluids are all largely made up of water. 

To these may be added tliat simple, structureless, 
solid substance, looking like ground glass, wbich forms, 
as we have seen, the basis of cartilage. Also granules, 
specks of indeterminate form, but always of minute 
dimensions. 

Just as we have seen the chemical elements combined 
to form the living tissues, we find these anatomical ele- 
ments combined to form the organs. The demonstra- 
tion of them is simple to the last degree. The speci- 
mens may all be brought in on a half -dime for a silver 
waiter, and an hour or two will be enough to give a 
satisfactory exhibition of the whole series. 

Let us now see if we can bring down the most gen- 
eral facts of LIFE to a statement as simple as those in 
which we have attempted to include the plans of com- 
position and structure. 

We cannot use our bodies in any manner without 
wearing away some portions of them, or so far dete- 
riorating these portions that they become unfit for 
their duties. These must, therefore, be got rid of, and 
their place supplied by fresh materials. You have 
only to overwork and underfeed a horse or a human 
being, and you find that the subject of the experiment 
loses weight rapidly ; and if it is carried too far, be- 
comes the victim of it. 



198 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

It is obvious, then, that we change our bodies as we 
change our clothes. It was an old fancy, belonging to 
the category of the seven stars, the seven ages, the 
seven days of the week, and the seven sleepers, that we 
are made over again every seven years. But a strong 
man, leading an active life, takes between two and 
three pounds of dry food daily, and five or six of liquids. 
He receives into his lungs between four and five thou- 
sand gallons of air every twenty-four hours, of which 
he absorbs between two and three pounds. In a year, 
therefore, such a man takes into his system about three 
thousand pounds of foreign material, or twenty times 
his own weight. All of this, with insignificant excep- 
tions has become a part of his own fluids or solids. That 
is, if he weighs one hundred and fifty pounds, he has 
been made over twenty times in the course of a year, 
or as often as once every two or three weeks. But 
the change occurs much more rapidly in some parts 
than in others, — in the blood, the hair, the cuticle, 
much more rapidly than in the bones or the teeth, so 
far as our observation extends. Yet, that the process 
of growth is pretty active even in the bones is rendered 
probable by the rapidity with which a fracture unites, 
especially in young and healthy persons. The dentists 
will tell you that even the teeth are capable of repair- 
ing their own damages to a certain extent, which im- 
plies that they too are changed more or less, like other 
parts. 

Just so long as this exchange of materials between 
the organized being, vegetable or animal, goes on, it 
is said to be alive. Provision is made for its being 
constantly kept up by the adjustment of the brute uni- 
verse to its growing and conscious tenants, plants and 
animals. 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 199 

Every organized being always lives immersed in a 
strong solution of its own elements. 

Sometimes, as in tlie case of the air plant, the solu- 
tion contains all its elements ; but in higher plants, and 
in animals generally, some of the principal ones only. 
Take our own bodies, and we find the atmosphere con- 
tains the oxygen and the nitrogen, of which we are so 
largely made up, as its chief constituents ; the hydro- 
gen, also, in its watery vapor, the carbon in its carbonic 
acid. What our air-bath does not furnish us we must 
take in the form of nourishment, supplied through the 
digestive organs. But the first food we take, after we 
have set up for ourselves, is air, and the last food we 
take is air also. We are all chameleons in ou? diet, 
as we are all salamanders in our habitats^ inasmuch as 
we live always in the fire of our own smouldering com- 
bustion ; a gentle but constant flame, fanned every day 
by the same forty hogsheads of air which furnish us, 
not with our daily bread, which we can live more than 
a day without touching, but with our momentary, and 
oftener than momentary aliment, without which we 
cannot live five minutes. 

We are perishing and being born again, at every 
instant. We do literally enter over and over again 
into the womb of that great mother from whom we 
get our bones and flesh and blood and marrow. " I 
die daily," is true of all that live. If we cease to die, 
particle by particle, and to be born anew in the same 
proportion, the whole movement of life comes to an 
end ; and swift, universal, irreparable decay resolves 
our frames into the parent elements. I can find the 
truth better stated by a great divine than in any book 
of Physiology that I remember : — 

" Every day's necessity calls for a reparation of that 



200 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

portion whicli Death fed on all night, when we lay in 
his lap, and slept in his outer chambers. The very 
spirits of a man prey upon the daily portion of bread 
and flesh, and every meal is a rescue from one death, 
and lays up for another ; and while we think a thought 
we die ; and the clock strikes, and reckons on our por- 
tion of eternity ; we form our words with the breath of 
our nostrils ; we have the less to live upon for every 
word we speak." 

The products of the internal fire which consumes us 
over and over again every year pass off mainly in 
smoke and steam from the lungs and the skin. The 
smoke is invisible only, because the combustion is so 
perfect. The steam is plain enough in our breaths on 
a frosty morning ; and an over-driven horse will show 
us on a larger scale the cloud that is always arising 
f x'om our own bodies. 

Man walks, then, not only in a vain show, but 
wrapped in an uncelestial aureole of his own material 
exhalations. A great mist of gases and of vapor rises 
day and night from the whole realm of living nature. 
The water and the carbonic acid which animals exhale 
become the food of plants, whose leaves are at once 
lungs and mouths. The vegetable world reverses the 
breathing process of the animal creation, restoring the 
elements which that has combined and rendered effete 
for its own purposes, to their original condition. The 
salt-water ocean is a great aquarium.- The air ocean 
in which we live is a " Wardian case," of larger di- 
mensions. 

We are ready now to attempt a definition which has 
tasked the ingenuity of so many physiologists, that it 
is like throwing a pebble on a cairn, to add a new one 
to the number. I have long been in the habit of giv- 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 201 

ing it as follows, hardly knowing whether it was my 
own, or conveyed, as the wise call a process not unfa- 
miliar to lecturers and writers : — 

Life is the state of an organized being in which it 
7naintains, or is ca2)ahle of maintaining^ its structural 
integrity by the constant interchange of elements with 
the surrounding media. 

Death is the final cessation of that state. We com- 
monly consider it as taking place when the last breath 
is drawn. To expire is, in our ordinary language, the 
synonyme of to die. After this last breath, no further 
interchange of material between the body and the sur- 
rounding elements takes place, or at least none that 
tends to keep the organization in its state of structural 
integrity. 

Still, there are unused materials and unexpended 
forces which sometimes startle us by their manifesta- 
tions after the body has ceased forever to be the tene- 
ment of conscious being. It is not the whole of death 
to " die," in its physiological any more than in its spir- 
itual sense. There seems to be good reason for saying 
that the beard and hair may grow, and some of the 
secretions continue to be formed, long after the last 
breath has been drawn. The heart of a decapitated 
criminal has been observed throbbing in his breast one 
hour, two hours and a half, nay, in one case twenty- 
seven hours and a half, after the axe had fallen. Even 
the severed parts contain a certain lingering vitality. 
Lord Bacon saw the heart of a traitor who had been 
executed leap for some minutes after it had been 
thrown into the fire. Still more startling evidences 
of life surviving death have been recorded. Dr. Ben- 
net Dowler of New Orleans has related very curious 
facts of movements occurring in the inanimate limbs of 



202 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OE LIFE. 

patients who had died of cholera, — movements so reg- 
ular and extensive as to recall the experience of the 
Ancient Mariner : — 

" The body of my brother's son 
Stood by me, knee to knee : 
The body and I pulled at one rope, 
But he said naught to me." 

From this glance at the composition, structure, and 
conditions of life belonging to organized beings, we can 
make several very plain practical inferences. A plant 
must find in the soil any elements it requires, and 
which the air does not furnish. We feed our cereals 
with phosphate of lime, for instance ; and we know 
that, unless we keep replenishing the soil, it is soon 
exhausted of this and other important constituents. 
So if a hen does not get lime enough in her food, she 
lays soft or thin shelled eggs. And just as certainly 
as a man does not get lime enough in his food, his 
bones will be liable to soften and bend under him. 

These little striped fibres, which do the bidding of 
your will, must be exercised, or they will undergo a 
gradual change, diminishing in size or in number, or 
perhaps becoming converted into fat, and thus substi- 
tuting a burden for a force. 

The constant exchange of elements between our 
bodies and the matter surrounding us, in which, as we 
have seen, life essentially consists, may be easily pre- 
vented or hindered to a greater or less extent. Death, 
or disturbance of health, in proportion to the interrup- 
tion, must follow. A cord about the neck obstructs the 
windpipe and is fatal. Air too long breathed has been 
robbed of its oxygen and become overloaded with car- 
bonic acid ; it can neither furnish the blood what it 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 203 

requires, nor relieve it of what it should get rid of, - — 
for a sponge already full will not take up water. 

Knowing the dozen elements of which the human 
body is made up, we know exactly what elements must 
be supplied in the food. An analysis of the common 
articles we use for our sustenance at once shows us 
how our tissues are renewed. Air and water furnish 
oxygen and hydrogen ; bread and meat supply us with 
nitrogen and carbon ; lime is found in the water we 
drink and the cereal grains ; phosphorus also in the 
latter, in milk and in eggs ; sulphur in the two last, 
and in water ; common salt (chlorine and sodium) in 
different articles of food, and added to all as a condi- 
ment ; potash in vegetable food generally, and in water ; 
iron in flesh and in water. 

One would say that the regulation of the conditions 
of the body should be as simple as the ordering of the 
conditions which enable a skilful agriculturist to raise 
healthy vegetables and fruits. There are only two 
difficulties, — we cannot choose our constitutions, and 
we cannot always command many of the circumstances 
which have most influence on health. 

What do we mean by constitution ? We mean the 
inherited sum of living force, with all its manifestar 
tions in form, in structure, in tendency. In the ele- 
ments of which we are composed, and the processes by 
which our life is maintained, we are all alike. But in 
constitution there are differences so great between in- 
dividuals that they hardly seem to inherit the same 
nature. Every vital act is harmoniously and easily 
performed in one set of persons, those whose tissues 
and organs are duly constituted and adjusted to each 
other. Everything goes wrong in another set of per- 
sons, in whom the same tissues and organs are ill con- 



204 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

structed and imperfectly fitted or proportioned. We 
all see about us those to whom life is a constant easy 
victory over the elements and forces of the outside 
world, and by their side those to whom the mere labor 
of existence is enough and more than enough to task 
all their powers. Invalidism is a function to which 
certain persons are born, as others are born to poetry 
or art as their calling. 

This difference of constitution makes it impossible 
to lay down a complete set of rules of universal ap- 
plication. If we could determine by an edict what 
families should be allowed to continue their lineage, if 
we could with propriety cause every child of a certain 
undervitalized make to take advantage of its period of 
innocence and retire from the unequal contest with the 
difficulties of life, it would be comparatively easy to 
lay down a code of health for our select community. 
But infants are allowed to grow up all around us 
whom the Spartans would have condemned without 
ceremony as unmerchantable human articles. These 
unfortunates find it very hard to accept the fact that 
their normal state is invalidism. They are constantly 
consulting medical men for evils no more to be reme- 
died than their stature can be made to suit them. The 
worse they are by nature, the more they cry to be set 
right. It is as if the cripples should all insist on be- 
ing taught all the accomplishments which the dancing- 
master professes to impart. 

Why particular families should run down, and taper 
off, and die out, it is not always easy to say, but we 
can all see that the process is continually going on 
around us. When Nature has made up her mind that 
she has had enough of a particular stock, and that its 
room is better than its company, the work of patching 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 205 

up tlie constitutions of its offspring and keeping them 
alive, if they can ever be called so, is one of the most 
desperate tasks assigned to the healers of men. How 
many lives, physiologically speaking, are a great deal 
more trouble than they are worth, — belonging to ani- 
mated machines no more fitted from the very first to 
keep vital time, than the watches sold at a Broadway 
mock-auction den are to tell the time of the day ! 

Yet some of these lives, so worthless in the whole- 
sale physiological aspect, are precious to their owners 
and the friends of their owners, — nay, they may go 
with natures worthy of far better fleshly tenements. 
No doubt there are many individuals, and some fami- 
lies, that would do best to let their infirmities die with 
them, rather than add them to the already sufficiently 
ample stock belonging to the race. Unfortunately, 
they do not commonly think so, and nature has at last 
to interfere with the gentle violence of what we call 
disease, but which is often a mere incapacity for liv- 
ing. 

There is one comfort even for these. Infirmities 
may be bred out of a race by fortunate alliances and 
improved conditions, so that, as I once showed by an 
example borrowed from this neighborhood, some of 
the great-great-grandchildren of a person who gradu- 
ated at Harvard College nearly a century and a half 
ago, a man of delicate organization and feeble health, 
were and are remarkable for robust qualities of body 
and mind. 

The tendency to physical deterioration is marked 
enough here in the northern and eastern section of the 
country, but whether more so than in other temperate 
regions is by no means proved. One of the lustiest 
looking Englishmen I have ever met told me that al- 



206 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

most every one of his relatives had died of consump- 
tion, and that he himself had been doomed at one time 
by his physician. Sir Kenelm Digby said that half 
the Londoners of his time died of that disease, — 
which was a great overstatement, no doubt. But I 
have often noticed, in our own returns of the weekly 
mortality of Boston, that one third, and sometimes one 
half, of the deaths of persons over twenty years old 
are from consumption. Some might think this was 
owing to our particular climate or conditions, but Dr. 
Casper's statistics show a greater percentage of phthi- 
sis for New York, Paris, Berlin, and Hamburg than 
for Boston. 

It may well be a question whether human creatures 
raised under glass, which is the condition of being 
raised at all for the civilized inhabitants of all but the 
central zone of the planet, represent the normal state 
of humanity. A man ought to be born under a tree, 
or at most in a tent, to get his full allowance of ele- 
mental influences. The land of the palm governs the 
land of the pine at this moment, either in virtue of 
the fact that the priests and prophets of Asia were 
better endowed men, or, as the Christian world gen- 
erally believes, were selected as worthiest of immediate 
communications from the Deity. 

It is not a question with most persons, however, 
whether they shall permanently change their climate. 
They must make the best of their own. Ours is a very 
trying one. On the seaboard we have the sudden tran- 
sition from warm southerly to chilling east winds, the 
last so much dreaded by invalids. This we may get 
rid of to some extent by going farther inland ; but the 
east wind has a bad name pretty widely as compared 
with the " wild west," the ^' sweet south," the " brae- 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 207 

ing north." Poets liave little to say about it, and that 
little not flattering : — 

" How do ye this blae eastliii' win', 
That 's like to blaw a body blin' ? " 

The hot summers " wilt " us ; the keen northwesters 
intoxicate us with their champagne-like stimulus. The 
dryness of the atmosphere drains our moisture and 
makes us thin, and consequently sensitive to outward 
influences. The last circumstance has been illustrated 
in a very interesting pamphlet by Mr. Desor. He 
tells us that laundresses from the Old World find 
their linen dries quicker here than at home ; that 
cooks find their bread hardens instead of moulding, 
as they used to see it ; and that persons who brought 
soft, silken hair from the Old World notice that it be- 
comes harsh and dry after a residence on this side of 
the Atlantic. To these things we must make up our 
minds. In compensation, we of the North, at least of 
New England, are almost wholly free from malaria. 
I examined this subject with some care many years 
ago, and could only find a spot here and there open to 
suspicion, — on the shores of Lake Champlain, and in 
former years at some points on one or two of the 
rivers of Western Massachusetts. In the earlier peri- 
ods of settlement, it seems to have betrayed its pres- 
ence by causing intermittents occasionally, and I have 
heard that within a few years these have been show- 
ing themselves in some places supposed to be exempt. 
A rare instance or two of the origination of fever and 
ague in this neighborhood may be found in recent 
medical records. " 

" It has encroached on our New England territory a good deal 
of late years. 



208 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

II. 

ADJUSTABLE CONDITIONS. 

To cultivate human organizations under glass, as we 
are submitted to the necessity of doing, implies fur- 
nishing them with artificial heat, and depriving them 
of natural light. Both these are grave considerations 
with reference to their effect on human beings. 

So long as people will sacrifice luxury, comfort, 
health, and even life, to economy, we shall have the 
drying anthracite fire, or the hole in the floor exhal- 
ing baked air and mineral effluvia, the tight room 
with double windows, the poisoned atmosphere, and 
the dull headache and fevered skin and sulphurous 
taste in our mouths which accompany in various de- 
grees these money - saving and life-wasting arrange- 
ments. 

Open fireplaces, wood, or soft coal, aided, if need 
be, by moderate furnace heat in the coldest weather, 
are the first requisites for health, comfort, and cheer- 
fulness. Even heating by steam or hot water is no 
substitute for the blaze of the open fireplace and the 
brisk circulation of air kept up by the breathing pas- 
sage of a room, — its chimney. 

A temperature of seventy degrees suits many per- 
sons. A famous traveller, inured to the heats of Af- 
rica, told me he liked to have the thermometer at 
sixty-eight degrees. An equally celebrated statesman 
whom I visited last winter wanted it at eighty degrees. 
Some are comfortable when it is not much over sixty. 

Warmth, however, and an atmosphere containing a 
due amount of moisture, are not enough to secure 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 209 

health without insuring the daily presence of a suffi- 
cient amount of light. The dark side of a street is far 
more subject to disease than the light side. Sir James 
Wylie found three times as many cases of disease on 
the shaded side of the barracks at St. Petersburg as 
on the other side. Dupuytren is said to have wrought 
a cure in the case of a lady in a seemingly desperate 
condition, by simply removing her from her dark 
quarters to a brighter residence, and keeping her as 
much as possible in the daylight. There is no better 
testimony on any suck point than that of Miss Flor- 
ence Nightingale, What she says of the value of light 
to those who are ill indicates no less its necessity for 
those who are well : — 

" Second only to fresh air, however, I should be in- 
clined to rank light in importance for the sick. Di- 
rect sunlight, not only daylight, is necessary for speedy 
recovery. . . . Instances could be given almost endless, 
where in dark wards, or in wards with a northern as- 
pect, even when thoroughly warmed, or in wards with 
borrowed light, even when thoroughly ventilated, the 
sick could not by any means be made speedily to re- 
cover." 

Very few persons seem to have a due sense of the 
luxury and benefit of aprication^ or immersion in the 
sunshine bath, which every fair day will furnish gra- 
tuitously to all applicants. One ancient man, very 
poor, and very simple in most matters, whose clay pipe 
I sometimes replenish for him, is almost the only per- 
son I happen to know who seems really to enjoy the 
sunshine as muck as if he were a vegetable. That these 
humbler creatures enjoy it, if they enjoy anything, we 
may guess by their actions. The passion of the sun- 
flower for " her god " is famous in song. But there 



210 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

are examples of still more ardent devotion than heis. 
Mr. Jesse tells how a potato, left in a dark cellar with 
only one opening, sent its shoot twenty feet to get at 
the light through that little crevice. After this story, 
the " eye " of a potato seems a well-deserved name for 
the bud that can see a crack so far off. The feathered 
bipeds value sunshine more than many of the un= 
plumed ones appear to. There is a little streak of 
morning sun which in early spring comes in between 
two buildings near by me and traverses the open 
space beyond, as the sun moves up the heavens. The 
sensible barn-yard fowls of the Infirmary hen-coops 
follow it as it slowly travels along, as faithfully as if 
their brains were furnished with heliostats. 

It is well to remember that there is something more 
than warmth in sunlight. The skin does not tan and 
freckle in warm, dark rooms. Photography reminds 
us that there is a chemistry in sunshine, without which 
that beautiful art would be unknown. You have only 
to look at the windows in some of the lower houses 
in Beacon Street, just above Charles, to see what a 
singular change of color has taken place in many of 
the panes of glass which were quite colorless when set. 
Mr. Gaffield's interesting experiments have illustrated 
this curious fact, and added another chapter to the al- 
chemy of the sunbeam. 

Color is not commonly consulted, except for the 
sake of the eyes ; but a notion has long prevailed in 
some countries that it has an important influence in 
disease. When John of Gaddesden was called to the 
son of Edward the Second, who was attacked with the 
small-pox, he had the prince wrapped in scarlet cloths, 
and surrounded with draperies of the same color. The 
Japanese, according to Ksempf er, have a similar fancy. 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 211 

It survived in England at least as late as 1744. A 
physician practising at that date tells how he was 
called to the child of a certain military officer, and, on 
his announcing that it was breaking out with small- 
pox, three women took off their scarlet capes, and 
wrapped the child in them. It was kept so enveloped 
during the whole time of its sickness. 

I had done with this matter of color, when, by one 
of those curious coincidences which seem more than 
accidental, between the end of the last paragraph and 
the beginning of this, a little book was laid on my 
table bearing upon this very subject. I cannot neg- 
lect such a hint from the Disposing Powers. " Hap- 
pily," says Mr. Masury, who sends me this " Popular 
Treatise on the Art of House Painting," " the day 
of dead- whites for the interior of our dwellings has 
passed by, — kt us hope not to return. It was a kind 
of Puritanism in painting, for which there was no 
warrant in nature, which, in such matters, should be 
our teacher and guide." And this leads me back to 
Miss Nightingale's invaluable " Notes," full of hints, 
such as only a sensitive woman could have had the 
subtlety to suggest. '' Form, color, will free your pa- 
tient from his painful ideas better than any argu- 
ment. . . . No one who has watched the sick can 
doubt the fact, that some feel stimulus from looking 
at scarlet flowers, exhaustion from looking at deep 
blue," etc. 

The light of the moon has, from time immemorial, 
been supposed to exercise some evil influence on living 
creatures, as the words moon- calf ^ moonstruch^ lu- 
natic^ remind us. That the moon is the chief cause of 
the tides we know. That it influences the weather is 
believed on the strength of a certain amount of evi 



212 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OE LIFE. 

dence. Professor Marcet of Gene^^a examined a series 
of meteorological tables extending from 1800 to 1860, 
and came to the result, from their showing, that the 
chance of a change of weather on the day of the full 
moon is 0.121, at new moon 0.125, the day after full 
moon 0.143, and the day after new moon 0.148. Now, 
if the moon influences the weather, it must, indirectly 
at least, influence human health. 

It has been supposed to cause and aggravate insan- 
ity more especially, not only in common belief, as may 
be seen in the writings of poets like Shakespeare and 
Milton and lawyers like Blackstone, but by so grave 
an authority as the illustrious Pinel, the reformer of 
the doctrine and treatment of mental diseases. Yet 
the notion is generally rejected, I believe, at this day. 
Dr. Harlan made nothing of it from the examination 
of his register ; and our own Dr. Woodward states, as 
the result of the analysis of his tables, that "no theory 
seems to be supported by them which has existed 
among the ignorant or wise men who have been be- 
lievers in the influence of the moon upon the insane." 
There are stories of persons having been struck with 
temporary blindness after sleeping in the moonlight. 

The tailor's art has blanched the surface of our 
bodies to the whiteness of celery. Like that, we are 
buried alive, all but our heads. We can hardly doubt 
that the condition of the primitive man was to bask in 
unimpeded sunshine, and that in depriving himself of 
it to so great an extent he must pay the penalty in the 
form of some physical deterioration. Men and women 
must have sunshine to ripen them as much as apples 
and peaches. The exposure that is liable to produce 
sunstroke, of which the present summer has furnished 
an unprecedented number of instances, and the over- 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 213 

fatigue of tlie eyes being guarded against, the sunbath 
may be considered as a great preservative and curative 
agent for most persons. Yet there are those with 
whom it does not seem to agree, and who avoid ex- 
posure, at least to the direct rays of the sun in warm 
weather, from their experience of the effects that fol- 
low it. Some individuals seem to be born a certain 
number of degrees north or south of the region fitted 
for their constitutions. 

The AIR we breathe is the next point to be touched 
upon. If we inspire and expire forty hogsheads of air 
a day, rob it of some pounds of oxygen, and load it 
with other pounds of carbonic acid gas, we must need 
a very large supply for our daily use. The ventilation 
of buildings, public and private, is accomplished easily 
and safely enough, if people will take the pains and 
spend the money. Yet it is sadly neglected by those 
who spare no trouble and expense for luxuries much 
less important. I have been at elegant dinner-parties, 
where, what with the number of guests crowded to- 
gether in a small apartment, the blaze of numerous 
lights, and the long sitting, to say nothing of the va- 
riety of wines that insisted on being tasted, the great- 
est care was no security against such a headache the 
next morning as only a debauch ought to account for. 
There were a dozen courses for the palate, and only 
one for the breathing organs. Let no host expect his 
guests to be anything but sleepy and stupid, if they 
are imprisoned in an atmosphere which reduces them 
all to a state of semi-asphyxia. 

It is our own fault, in most cases, if we do not get 
ventilation enough at home, without any dangerous ex- 
posure to draughts. But once cross your own thresh- 



214 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

old and go abroad, you are no longer safe. A friend 
grapples you, warm with exercise, and keeps you talk- 
ing, with the wind blowing through you, charged with 
catarrhs, rheumatisms, lung - fevers, and other com- 
plaints, any of which your particular constitution may 
happen to fancy. Never stop on a doorstep to discuss 
the origin of evil, or linger at a street corner to settle 
the authorship of Junius and Eikon Basilike, unless 
you are impregnable to the blast as an iron-clad to 
bullets. There are some, no doubt, who can run half 
a dozen times round the Common, and sit down on 
Park Street Meeting-house steps and cool off, without 
being the worse for it. But sensible persons are 
guided by their own experience. It is not their affair 
how much exposure other people can bear. Least of 
all must the delicate male sex be guided by the con- 
duct of their rugged and insensible female fellow-crea- 
tures. Either God tempers the wind to the bare 
shoulders as to the shorn lamb, or these dear sisters 
of ours are the toughest of organized creatures. 

The railroad car is the place where your danger is 
greatest. A delicate little woman, sitting on the seat 
before you, will throw a window wide open, and let 
the winter wind in upon you in a steady current for 
hours, without the least idea that she is committing 
homicide. " There is no need of assassination," says 
the late Professor Harris, " to temper the asperities of 
politics. When your victim starts for Washington, 
let there always be a woman on the seat before him. 
He wiU die a natural death before long, — perfectly 
natural, under the circumstances." 

There must be some reason in the nature of things 
for the way in which the seemingly tender frame of 
woman bears such exposure to the elements. We 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 215 

must understand her before we condemn her for deal- 
ing death and destruction among the unfortunate 
males who are her fellow-travellers. Woman requires 
more air, or at least purer air, than man. She is the 
first to faint in a crowd ; she takes to her fan in dis- 
tress before a man begins to be uncomfortable. In 
her need of fresh air she becomes accustomed to 
draughts, just as in obeying the law of her being, to 
please, she learns to brave the seasons in an undress 
which her brother or her lover would consider his 
death-warrant. I have seen a young girl sniffing the 
icy breeze of January through a wide-open car window 
as if it were a zephyr of summer, while the seats about 
her were deserted by one frozen wretch after another, 
no one of them willing to interfere with her atmos- 
pheric cold-bath, though it was at the risk of their 
lives they had been forced to share it. The struggle 
between those who complain of being stifled and those 
who fear being chilled to death is one that can never 
cease ; it is, like conservatism and reform, a matter of 
organic instinct. Women are born atmospheric re- 
formers. 

The principles on which the amount and the nature 
of our FOOD are based flow obviously from the facts 
already laid down. We must take enough to supply 
the daily waste. We must supply in due proportion 
the dozen elements or more of which our body is 
formed. Air and water are of course the principal 
substances on which we feed. From these we get our 
supplies of oxygen and hydrogen. Why not of nitro- 
gen, as four fifths of the air consist of that gas ? 
Thirty hogsheads of nitrogen pass in and out of our 
lungs daily, and yet it can hardly be shown that we 



216 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

take toll of it to the amount of a cubic inch ! We are 
all our lives soaking in a great aerial ocean, made up 
chiefly of nitrogen ; and we shall die of nitrogen-fam- 
ine, if we do not have a portion of it supplied to us in 
our solid or our liquid food. 

" Water, water everywhere, 
And not a drop to drink ! " 

We get our nitrogen from the cereals that furnish our 
bread, from peas and beans, from milk, cheese, and 
from animal food, except its fatty portions. We can- 
not take carbon, sulphur, phosphorus, lime, chlorine, 
iron, potass, soda, in their simple forms ; but they are 
contained in the plants and in the flesh of animals 
which furnish our common diet, or in the water we 
drink, or, as in the case of salt, supplied as condi- 
ments. If the food does not supply iron enough, we 
have to take that separately, as we do salt ; in fact, it 
might very properly take its place in the casters, were 
it a little less unpalatable. 

The body is a soil capable of being improved by 
adding the elements in which it is deficient, as much 
as farming or garden land. Fresh vegetables are the 
fertilizers of human clay or dust that has grown scor- 
butic on a long course of salted food. On the other 
hand, some of our domestic animals must be " salted " 
as much as they must be fed or watered, or they will 
not thrive. The agriculture of the human body has 
hitherto largely consisted in top-dressing, if we may 
judge by the number of capillary fertilizers we see ad- 
vertised in the papers. But out of a proper study of 
the material wants of the system, and of the best nu- 
tritive substances for supplying these wants, we may 
expect a great improvement in the physical conditions 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 217 

of the race. The cook makes our bodies ; the apothe- 
cary only cobbles them. 

Shall we make use of animal or vegetable food, or 
both ? The controversy has lost something of its im- 
portance since chemistry has shown the essential iden- 
tity of the most characteristic elements of the seeds of 
which we make our bread and the flesh of animals. 
Nature declares unequivocally for animal food in the 
case of mammalian, including human, infants ; fat and 
cheese, with eau sucrSe and saline condiments, being 
our earliest diet, in the form of milk* Very young 
•birds are fed entirely on eggs, unboiled. As they 
grow up, many animals become vegetable feeders, but 
not always so exclusively as we suppose. I once saw 
a squirrel eating a live snake like a radish, and I have 
records of several similar facts. Cows will eat fish 
and other animal food occasionally, perhaps on the 
principle that all flesh is grass. 

It is easy to understand the repugnance with which 
fastidious persons regard the act of devouring the 
flesh of animals. The fanatics on the subject are 
sometimes terribly abusive, as I have had occasion to 
know. Yet I have had refreshing seasons of converse 
with vegetable feeders, who are commonly of a specu- 
lative turn of mind, and amuse unbelievers with their 
curious fancies. Theories commonly go in sets like 
chamber furniture, and you will find a mind furnished 
throughout, physiologically, philosophically, morally, 
theologically, in the same shade of color, and with the 
same general pattern prevailing through all its articles 
of belief. 

Here and there a healthy person is found thriving 
on vegetable diet, and patients who have had apoplec- 
tic attacks, or slight epileptic seizures, and some who 



218 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

have had symptoms threatening consumption, seem to 
have arrested or delayed the course of disease by con- 
fining themselves to it habitually. 

There is no absolute answer to the inquirer who 
would know, once for all, whether he is herbivorous or 
omnivorous. Climate settles it in a great measure. 
The blubber of Iceland and the bread-fruit of the Pa- 
cific islands are the enforced food of their inhabitants. 
As the nutritive elements of animal and vegetable 
food are, as has been said, the same, it is mainly a 
question of appetite and digestion. Some have an in- 
vincible repugnance to animal food, for which there is 
probably some good reason in the economy. Others 
relish it when they hardly care for anything else. In 
Dr. Beaumont's famous experiments on Alexis St. 
Martin, the man with an accidental side-door to his 
stomach, we have some very interesting results as to 
the digestibility of different substances. Tripe and 
pigs' feet were easiest of digestion ; pork, most diffi- 
cult. We can say ex pede Herculem^ but not ex pede 
p or cum. Venison came next to the first two in the 
ease with which it was reduced in the stomach. 
- There is a widely prevalent and very ancient preju- 
dice against swine's flesh, traceable as far back as the 
early Egyptians, embodied in the codes of Judaism 
and Mahometanism, and shared in by many on various 
grounds, the latest of which is the fear of the trichina. 
Considering the vast amount of pork consumed in this 
country, and the few instances in which these little 
living coils are found specking human muscles, the 
danger cannot be great. Proper cooking reduces it to 
nothing at all. That a pork-fed race will in the long 
run show a constitutional and characteristic difference 
from one that lives on beef and mutton, on fish chiefly, 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 219 

or vegetable food, we may safely believe. We are 
trying the experiment on a great scale. With what 
feelings would Jerusalem have looked on Cincinnati 
in prophetic vision ! Few Christians reject the forbid- 
den article in at least one form. A law prohibiting 
the use of ham in sandwiches would bring dismay to 
the bearers of limcheon - baskets and cast a darker 
shadow over those sufficiently depressing festivals 
known as picnics. 

Veal disagrees mth a good many people ; with 
some, probably, who do not suspect it as the cause of 
the disturbance of the digestive function while they are 
suffering from it. Persons who are liable to be injured 
by it do well to avoid " chlchen salad " and croquettes^ 
unless their composition is sworn to before a magis- 
trate. Soups made from veal, and sweetbreads, seem 
less liable to prove unwholesome. 

I have met with individuals who could not eat mut- 
ton^ and I have seen two cases in which corned heef 
was the apparent cause of attacks of vertigo. 

Cases of poisoning from eating partridges are not 
very uncommon. Dr. Jacob Bigelow has brought to- 
gether accounts of ten such cases in his collection of 
essays entitled "Nature in Disease," one of which I 
myself attended and furnished him. The symptoms 
are somewhat like those occasioned by prussic acid, 
and are not known to have terminated fatally in any 
instance, though sufficiently alarming. The cases 
commonly occur in winter, when snow is on the 
ground. An ancient lady told me that the first Dr. 
Jeffries used to speak of February as the month of 
danger from this cause. Only three of the cases given 
by Dr. Bigelow are dated, and all these happened in 
February. The cause of the poisonous quality of the 



220 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

flesh of certain partridges has been supposed to be in 
something they have eaten, especially the buds and 
leaves of the mountain laurel, on which the bird has 
fed while the ground was covered with snow. The 
examination of the crops of many partridges has not 
confirmed this notion, or shown anything to account 
for the poisonous effects observed. 

Lobsters, clams, mussels, mackerel, have all occa- 
sionally proved poisonous. 

Cheese, honey, strawberries, disagree with many 
persons. 1 saw a sudden outbreak of nettle - rash 
brought on by strawberries last year, annoying, but 
soon over, and hardly enough to frighten the subject 
of it from repeating the experiment. 

It is a delicate matter to meddle with the subject of 
DRiisrKS, after the experience of the last year or two, in 
which we have seen purely scientific questions made 
the subject of party controversy. With reference to 
the great point in dispute, there has been some confu- 
sion between two different questions ; namely, that of 
the effects of alcohol and that of the effects of differ- 
ent alcoJiolic drinks. 

Alcohol itself can hardly be said to be used as a 
drink at all, though the jars containing preparations, 
anatomical or other, in museums, are said to have 
sometimes lost their contents too rapidly for evapora- 
tion to account for. 

All alcoholic drinks have certain effects in com- 
mon ; that is, all affect the brain more or less. A 
single glass of lager -beer changes the current of 
thought and the tone of feeling in a person not in the 
habit of using stimulants. But alcoholic drinks differ 
entirely from each other in some of their effects. 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 221 

Champagne, beer, gin, brandy are all well known to 
produce specific influences on particular functions, in 
addition to tlieir action on the brain, wbich again is 
by no means identical in all these liquors. 

But the difference in their action extends further 
than at first sight appears. An argument has been 
founded on the alleged fact that alcohol diminishes 
the exhalation of carbonic acid from the system. It 
appears, however, from the very careful and long-con- 
tinued experiments of Dr. Edward Smith, that while 
some alcoholic drinks diminish this exhalation, brandy 
and gin, for instance, others increase it, as rum, ale, 
and porter. Lallemand and his collaborators found 
that alcohol passed unchanged out of the system, as 
we know it does by perceiving its smell too often in 
our neighbor's breath. But only a limited portion of 
the alcohol taken, one fourth it is said, is thus ac- 
counted for ; and the rest may, for aught that yet ap- 
.pears, serve as food or fuel in the system. The chem- 
ical argument, on which so much stress has been laid, 
cannot be safely appealed to. We must turn to ex- 
perience. 

There is no need of dwelling on the ruinous effects 
of over-indulgence in strong drink. Neither is there 
any use in telling lies, still less in legislating them. 
The habitual use of alcoholic fluids in the form of 
wine does not prevent men and women from living 
long, active, useful, healthy, and virtuous lives. Four 
of those whom I most honored in the last generation 
drank wine daily all the years I knew them. Their 
age reached an average of between eighty-seven and 
eighty-eight years, and yet not one of them was of ro- 
bust habit, or promised to attain any remarkable lon- 
gevity. 



222 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

This argument from experience is good as far as it 
goes, but may easily be perverted by tbose who are 
neglecting all the rules of moderation which these four 
persons strictly observed. A common mistake is to 
confound the tolerance of a disturbing agent, which 
habit easily establishes, with the indifference of the 
constitution to it. One may take a drachm or two of 
laudanum in a day, after practice enough, without 
minding it much, but not without its contributing its 
fraction to the bodily and mental ruin which the drug 
brings about in due time. So one may form the habit 
of taking considerable quantities of alcoholic drink 
every day with apparent impunity, yet every observing 
eye will detect in the complexion, the variable states 
of the mind and temper, and by and by in the slight 
unsteadiness which marks the slow change going on in 
the nervous centres, that the system has all along 
been suffering, though its complaints may have been 
too slight to attract much attention. 

We cannot disguise the fact, however, that men 
" drink " because they like it, much more than for any 
good they suppose it does them, beyond such pleasure 
as it may afford ; and this is precisely the point that 
all arguments fail to reach. Pleasure is the bird in 
the hand which foolish persons will always choose be- 
fore the two birds in the bush which are to be the re- 
wards of virtue. Intoxication offers to the weak or 
ill-managed brain a strange pleasing confusion, a kind 
of Brahma's heaven, " where naught is everything and 
everything is naught," and where all perplexities at 
last resolve themselves into the generous formula, " it 's 
of no consequence." 

If Physiology does not condemn all alcoholic drinks 
as poisons ; and the argument that it does has clearly 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 223 

been overstated ; if we cannot prevent their use by 
reasoning or legislation ; the next thing is to find out 
which among them are likely to do least harm. • If the 
battle is to be between the native and foreign light 
wines on the one hand, and any distilled spirit on the 
other, we can hardly hesitate. We have of late years 
Jairly nationalized the Scotchman's usquebaugh under 
the shorter name of whiskey. It exactly suits the 
American tendency to simplify all contrivances and 
reach the proposed end by the shortest route. It fur- 
nishes an economical, compendious, portable, manage- 
able, accommodating, and not unpalatable method of 
arriving at the Brahma's heaven above mentioned. 
And there is good reason to fear that it is breeding a 
generation of drunkards. In view of its dangers, many 
of those who believe in abstinence from all strong- 
drinks may agree with Professor Agassiz and Dr. Ham- 
mond, that it is expedient to encourage the importation 
and production of those wines which have proved com- 
paratively safe and wholesome as habitual beverages 
to so many generations of men. 

Assuming that alcoholic drinks will continue to be 
used, it is well to know which are best, or, if the tee- 
totaller's scale is to be adopted, which is worst. Cham- 
pagne is the lightest of wines to many persons. 
Sherry is very often better borne than Madeira, which 
is too acid. Rum proves quieting in some cases, 
where whiskey irritates. Dr. Edward Smith has found 
rum and milk one of the most valuable forms of 
nourishment in exhausting diseases, and less disturb- 
ing to the brain than other alcoholic mixtures. Willis 
found a glass of ale act kindly as a " thought-stopper " ; 
but all such direct attempts on the thinking centres 
are dangerous and of exceptional application. Some 



224 PAGES TKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

cases of dyspepsia have been cured or benefited by the 
use of cider ^ — a fact hardly surprising when we re- 
member the chemical nature of the process of digestion. 
Brandy and gin may properly be called alcoholic 
drugs, and are prescribed for certain special conditions 
of the system. The same remark might be applied to 
whiskey when prescribed for consumptive patients ; it 
forms part of a plan of treatment, to be judged by its 
effects as observed by an expert. 

The experience of those who train for athletic sports 
has abundantly shown that alcoholic drinks and nar- 
cotics form no part of a regimen meant to insure the 
best physical condition. The inference is plain enough 
that their habitual use can only be justified by ex- 
ceptional circumstances, such as age, invalidism, or 
temporary exhaustion. The " coming man " will con- 
sult his physician, perhaps, before he ventures to em- 
ploy any of these disturbing agents. The present man 
is at no loss for a motive. *• 

" If on my theme I riglitly thitik:, 
There are five reasons wliy men drink: 
Good wine, a friend, because I 'm dry, 
Or least I should be by and by, 
' Or any other reason why." 

Coffee^ in excess, produces heat, headache, tremors, 
wakefulness, and a kind of half-insane disconnection 
in the association of ideas. Tea^ in excess, is liable to 
cause wakefulness and palpitations. The heart tumbles 
about in a very alarming way, sometimes, under its in- 
fluence. Shall we give them up, because their over- 
use disturbs the system ? Common sense answers, that 
other substances besides oxygen may require dilution 
to change^ them from destructive or injurious agents 
into food, or comforts, or luxuries. Liebig justifies 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 225 

the use of both on chemical principles. Better than 
this, common experience proves them to be adapted to 
most constitutions. Dr. Hammond says that the use 
of both in armies cannot be too higlily commended. 
Dr. Kane's exploring parties found that coffee served 
them best in the morning, and tea after the 'day's work, 
— a conclusion which many of us have arrived at by 
our own observation. 

The tobacco question is one of the hardest to deal 
with. When the Arctic voyager describes his little 
party travelling over the icebergs, and pictures them 
as they rest at evening, when their freezing day's jour- 
ney is over, who can grudge them the pipe of tobacco 
they take with such calm enjoyment after their coffee ? 
Who would have robbed Napoleon of his snuff-box at 
Waterloo ? Who would deny the sailor on his mid- 
night watch, or the sentry on his round, the solace 
which he finds in his acrid nepenthe? The plain 
truth about tobacco is, that it is not a strong poison 
enough to produce any very palpable effects on the 
health, when used in small quantities, by people of 
average constitutions. Yet I remember seeing a very 
famous athlete decline a cigar offered him, on the 
ground that it would be enough to unfit him for his 
performance, which required perfectly steady nerves 
and muscles. A danger to which smokers are exposed 
is injury to the temper, through the increased irritabil- 
ity which the practice is apt to produce, and to the 
will, which it is powerful to subjugate. This habit 
introduces into the conduct of life one of the most 
imperious forms of self-indulgence known to human 
experience. Our state-prison convicts are said to pine 
for their tobacco more than any other luxury of free- 

15 



226 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIEE. 

dom. The amount of duty unperformed or postponed 
or slighted, in obedience to the craving for the narcotic 
stimulant, must form a large item in the list of the 
many things left undone which ought to have been 
done. Carry the use of the strange herb a little further, 
and the partial palsy of the will extends to other func- 
tions. The sense of vision is one of the first points 
where the further encroachment of the drug shows it- 
self. Many cases of amaurosis^ or loss of power in 
the nerve of the eye, are traced to the free use of to- 
bacco. Some hard smokers are great workers, as we 
all know ; but few who have watched the e:ffects of 
nicotization on will and character would deny that it 
handicaps a man, and often pretty heavily, in the race 
for distinction. It encourages revery, — the contem- 
plation of the possible, which is a charming but un- 
wholesome substitute for the performance of the duty 
next at hand. If we divide our friends into the if 
things were so and the as things are so sections, the 
nicotizers will probably be found most numerous among 
the former. But it must be remembered that all hab- 
its of this kind, like insanity, are more apt to fasten 
themselves on natures originally defective and ill-bal- 
anced, than on those in which the poise of the faculties 
is well adjusted, and the self -determining power too vig- 
orous to become enslaved. If one comes to the con- 
clusion that he will be better for leaving off the use of 
tobacco, he must expect to find that it costs him a hard 
struggle. It is a second weaning, almost as trying as 
the first, but a few days put an end to the conflict. 

The subject of clothing is understood well enough, 
and the rules of common sense are well enough ob- 
served by men. But woman is under the guidance 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 227 

of a higher law than any relating to her individual 
safety. 

" No woman that is a woman," says the late Pro- 
fessor Harris, '' values her comfort, her health, or her 
life in comparison with her personal appearance. She 
is impelled by a profound logic, say rather a divine in- 
stinct. On the slender thread of her personal attrac- 
tions hangs the very existence of a human future. The 
crinlde of a ringlet, the tie of a ribbon, has swayed the 
wavering choice of a half-enamored swain, and given 
to the world a race which would never have come to 
the light of day but for a pinch of the curling-tongs or 
a turn of the milliner's fingers." 

It is in virtue of this supreme indifference to conse- 
quences, — this sublime contempt of disease and death 
as compared with the loss of the smallest personal ad- 
vantage, — that woman has attained the power of re- 
sistance to exposure which so astonishes the male sex. 
Think of her thin shoes and stockings, her bare or 
scarcely protected neck and arms, her little rose-leaf 
bonnet, by the side of the woollen socks, the layers of 
flannel and broadcloth, and the warm hats and caps 
of her effeminate companion ! Our cautions are of no 
use, except to the fragile sex, — our brothers in suscep- 
tibility and danger. 

" A man will tell you he has the constitution of a 
horse ; but the health of a horse is notoriously delicate, 
as Shakespeare reminds you. A woman is compared 
to a bird by poets and lovers. It should be to a snow- 
bird," says the late Professor Harris. 

We may learn a lesson in the matter of clothing from 
the trainers and jockeys. They blanket their horses 
carefully after exercise. We come in heated, and 
throw off our outside clothing. Why should not a man 



228 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

be cared for as well as Flora Temple or Dexter ? We 
dress for suminer, and the next thing down goes the 
thermometer, and we run a risk which the owner of a 
trotting horse would not subject his beast to for a 
thousand dollars. Last Sunday the thermometer was 
74° Fahrenheit in the morning ; on Monday at the same 
hour, it was 5Q°. Yet when one has once worn sum- 
mer clothes, it is hard to change back, and we pre- 
fer to take the chance of rheumatism, pleurisy, " con- 
gestion of the lungs," or common catarrh, which is 
troublesome enough without going further. 

The conveniences for the use of the bath constitute 
one great advantage that city life offers over that of 
common country-houses. Habit makes it one of the 
essentials of comfortable existence. A morning shower- 
bath is a cordial better than any sherry-wine bitters. 
A plunge into the salt sea brings back youth in a way 
to shame Mrs. Allen's hair-restorer. But remember 
Alexander at the Cydnus, going in too hot ! Remem- 
ber Leon Javelli, the great performer on the tight 
rope, who stayed in too long ! One of the finest human 
organisms ever shown, in the flower of physical per- 
fection, was doubled up in spasms, and straightened 
out and laid in the earth almost before the cord had 
ceased quivering under his elastic bounds. It is a 
word and a blow with Nature when her laws are in- 
sulted or trifled with. 

It is by no means so easy to lay down precise rules 
about EXERCISE as many at first thought suppose. 
When one is told to walk two or four hours daily, it 
seems as if the measure of time was the measure of 
work to be done. But one person weighs a hundred 
pounds and a little over, a large part of it muscle, 
which does not feel its own weight ; and another person 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 229 

weighs two hundred and fifty pounds, three quarters 
of it inert matter, nearly as hard to carry as if it were 
packed in boxes and bundles. Think of Miles Dar- 
den, the great North-Carolinian, weighing, as we are 
told, over one thousand pounds, walking off a dozen 
miles in the company of a feather-weight who seems to 
himself a little lighter than nothing, feeling so " corky," 
in fact, that he almost wants anchoring, like a balloon, 
to keep him down ! Some of these very heavy people 
have but little muscle to work with. I have seen those 
fine muscular masses which emboss the front aspect of 
the Torso of the Vatican with swelling reliefs, reduced 
to little more than the thickness of a sheet of paper, 
in a man, too, of large proportions. Some persons are 
thought lazy when they are sioaply over-weighted and 
under-muscled. On the other hand, there are many 
persons of the pattern of Joseph Hailes, " the spider," 
as they called him, a noted prize-fighter, with muscles 
slender as those of monkeys, but who can use them as 
if they were made of iron. Whether an individual re- 
quires one hour's exercise in the open air daily, or 
three or four, must depend in great measure on how 
much the person has to carry. 

Two points deserve special attention connected with 
exercise, — the aeration of the blood and its distribu- 
tion. Exercise drives it more rapidly through the 
lungs, and quickens the breathing in proportion. You 
will see persons, not in love so far as is known, who 
sigh heavily from time to time. It is simply to make 
up the arrears of their languid respiration, which 
leaves the blood over-carbonated and under-oxygen- 
ated. A deep breath sets it right for the moment, as 
the payment of a long bill disposes of many petty 
charges that have been accumulating. 



230 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

During exercise the muscles want blood, and suck 
it up like so many sponges. But when the brain is 
working, that wants blood, and when the stomach is 
digesting, that wants blood, and so of other organs. 
Therefore the best time for brain work is before exer- 
cising in the morning ; for those who are strong enough, 
before breakfast, but for others after the light meal of 
the morning, which does not task the digestive powers 
to any great extent. After a couple of hours' exercise 
the mind is no longer what it was when it had all the 
blood to itself. You may criticise what you wrote 
while the brain had the whole circulation to draw upon, 
but insight and invention are dim and languid com- 
pared to what they were in the virgin hours of the 
morning. The cream of the day rises with the sun. 

The effects of prolonged training on the after con- 
ditions of the subjects of it have been often questioned. 
The recent death of Chambers, the rowing champion 
of England, of consumption^ has called attention anew 
to the matter. It is an old story, however, that ath- 
letes are liable to become phthisical. A case has been 
mentioned where a pugilist died of consumption not 
long after winning a prize-fight. Charles Freeman, 
the " American Giant," who fought the " Tipton 
Slasher " in the prize-ring, died of the same disease, 
as did the " Spider " above referred to. Dr. Hope 
has pointed out the danger of bringing on disease of 
the heart by over-exertions in boat-races and Alpine 
excursions. When a young man strains himself in a 
rowing-match until he grows black in the face, he is 
putting his circulating and breathing organs to the 
hazard of injuries which are liable to outlast the mem- 
ory of all his brief triumphs. "It is the pace that 
kills," is an axiom as applicable to men as to horses. 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 231 

I am disposed to be as charitable to human infirm- 
ity in the matter of sleep as I am in that of exercise. 
I would no more accept Sir Edward Coke's limit of 
six hours than I would indorse his other arrangements. 
Eight hours seem to me a fairer average, but many 
can do with less, and some may want more. General 
Pichegru is said to have found four enough. Some, 
like Napoleon, can help themselves to sleep whenever 
they will. Our great General can catch a nap on the 
field while a battle is going on. It is much more com- 
mon to find a difficulty in going to sleep after getting 
to bed. Those who are wakeful can do a good deal 
by forming the habit of dismissing all the toils and 
cares of the day, so far as possible, during the hour 
preceding their bedtime. There is good management, 
as well as piety, in closing the day with an act of de- 
votion. " Happy is the patient camel, happy is the 
humble saint," says the late Professor Harris ; " they 
kneel when the day is done, and their burden is lifted 
from them." 

Occupation of some kind is necessary to the health 
of mind and body in most persons. Yet we are so 
lazy by nature that, unless we are forced to work, we 
are apt to do nothing. For this reason it is that Cole- 
ridge would have every literary man exercise a pro- 
fession. The body requires a certain amount of at- 
mospheric pressure to the square inch. The mind 
must have the pressure of incumbent duties, or it will 
grow lax and spongy in texture for want of it. For 
want of such pressure, we see so many rich people al- 
ways restless in search of rest, who cannot be easy in 
Fifth Avenue or Beacon Street for thinking of the 
Boulevards, and :>nce there, are counting the days un- 



232 PAGES TROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

til they are home again. A life of mere gossip and 
amusement may do well enough in some Old World 
capitals, but is desperate in American cities. A wicked 
Parisian would find it punishment enough to be sent 
to Philadelphia or New York, or even Boston, when 
he dies. 

Do what you will to keep well, the time will proba- 
bly come when you will want the advice of a Physi- 
cian. If you will trust a lecturer, who does not prac- 
tise, and has not practised for a good many years, 
he will give you some rules in which he believes you 
may put confidence. Choose a sensible man, person- 
ally agreeable to yourself, if possible, whom you know 
to have had a good education, to stand well with the 
members of his own profession, and of whom other sci- 
entific men, as well as physicians, speak respectfully. 
Do not select your medical adviser on the strength of 
any vague stories of his " success." The best physi- 
cian in a city loses the largest number of patients. 
You stare, no doubt, but reflect a moment. He is 
called to all the hopeless cases. His patients trust him 
to the last, whereas people are apt to drop the charla- 
tan as soon as they are in real danger. 

Once having chosen your medical adviser, be slow 
to leave him, except for good cause. He has served 
an apprenticeship to your constitution. I saw a lady 
not many months ago, who, in talking of an illness 
from which she had long suffered, told me she had 
consulted twenty-six different doctors in succession, 
and was then in search of a twenty-seventh. I did not 
tell her she was as bad as Don Giovanni, but I was 
glad my name did not have to be added to the roll of 
her professional conquests, though my visit was a very 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 233 

pleasant and friendly one. I recommended a great 
master in one of the specialties, then residing in this 
neighborhood, who I thought would understand her 
case better than anybody else, and that she should 
stick to him and his prescriptions, and give up this but- 
terfly wandering from one camomile flower of medicine 
to another. 

What is the honest truth about the medical art ? 
That by far the largest nxunber of diseases which phy- 
sicians are called to treat will get well at any rate, 
even in spite of reasonably bad treatment. That of 
the other fraction, a certain number will inevitably die, 
whatever is done. That there remains a small margin 
of cases where the life of the patient depends on the 
skill of the physician. That drugs now and then 
save life ; that they often shorten disease and remove 
symptoms ; but that they are second in importance to 
food, air, temperature, and the other hygienic influ- 
ences. That was a shrewd trick of Alexander's phy- 
sician, on the occasion before referred to, of his at-, 
tack after bathing. He asked three days to prepare 
his medicine. Time is the great physician as well as 
the great consoler. 

Sensible men in all ages have trusted most to Na- 
ture. Hippocrates, more than two thousand years ago, 
laid down the whole doctrine in just three words. 
Sydenham, two hundred years ago, applied it in prac- 
tice. He was called to a young man who had been 
well blooded and physicked and dieted by his doctor, 
but seemed not to be doing very well. The great phy- 
sician sat down and entered into discourse with the 
young man. Presently out went his under lip, like a 
pouting child's, and the next thing, he burst into a 
terrible passion of crying. It is as a fit of the mother, 



234 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

said the English Hippocrates, and proceedeth from 
naught but emptiness. Let him have a roast chicken 
to his dinner, with a cup of canary. And so his disor- 
der left him. " Temperance, hard work, and absti- 
nence from medicine," — such was the formula given 
us the other day by our admirable Dr. Jacob Bigelow 
as the secret of his own long-continued health of mind 
and body, and the essence of the experience of a life 
devoted more especially to the practice of the healing 
art and the teaching of the materia medica. 

You are liable to hear babble in some quarters 
about " old school " and " new school," about " alio- 
pathists" and other patJiists, and may at last come to 
think there is a great division in the field of medical 
practice, two or more contradictory doctrines being bal- 
anced against each other. Now it is just as well to 
understand the unmeaning character of this way of 
talking. 

People may call themselves what they like, but if 
they apply a term to their neighbors, they should see 
that it is one which belongs to them. The medical 
profession, as represented by the Massachusetts Medi- 
cal Society, for instance, or by the teachers in the 
leading universities of the country, are not " allopa- 
thists " at all ; but if they must have a Greek name 
of this pattern, they are pantopatJiists ; that is, they 
profess only this simple doctrine, to employ any agency 
wJiicJi experience shows to he useful in the treatment 
of disease. Anything that can make a decent show 
for itself is sure of a trial at their hands. But then they 
are the judges of what constitutes a presumption in 
favor of any alleged remedy, and they are a great deal 
better judges than you, or than your aunt, or your 
grandmother, because they have made a business of 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 235 

studying the history of disease, and know how easy it 
is for people to deceive themselves and others in the 
matter of remedies. 

Shall they try the medicines advertised with the cer- 
tificate of justices of the peace, of clergymen, or even 
members of Congress ? Certainly, it may be an- 
swered, any one of them which makes a good case for 
itself. But the difficulty is, that the whole class of 
commercial remedies are shown by long experience, 
with the rarest exceptions, to be very sovereign cures 
for empty pockets, and of no peculiar efficacy for any- 
thing else. You may be well assured that if any 
really convincing evidence was brought forward in be- 
half of the most vulgar nostrum, the chemists would 
go at once to work to analyze it, the physiologists to 
experiment with it, and, the young doctors would all 
be trying it on their own bodies if not on their patients. 
But we do not think it worth while, as a general rule, 
to send a Cheap Jack's gilt chains and lockets to the 
mint to be tested for gold. We know they are made 
to sell, and so with the pills and potions. 

Remember this then, that the medical profession, 
fairly enough represented by the bodies I have men- 
tioned, have no theory or doctrine which prevents 
them from using anything that will do you good. If 
they do not adopt this or that alleged remedy which 
your aunt or your grandmother praises as a panacea, 
it is because they do not think a case is made out 
in its favor. They consider the witnesses incompe- 
tent or dishonest, it may be, or the evidence wholly 
unsatisfactory on its own showing. Think how rap- 
idly any real discovery is appropriated and comes into 
universal use I 

Take anaesthetics, take the use of bromide of potas- 



236 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OE LIFE. 

sium, and see how easily they obtained acceptance. If 
you are disposed to think any of the fancy systems has 
brought forward any new remedy of value which the 
medical profession has been slow to accept, ask any 
fancy practitioner to name it. Let him name one. — 
the best his system claims, — not a hundred, but one. 
A single new, efficient, trustworthy remedy which the 
medical profession can test as they are ready to test, 
before any scientific tribunal, opium, quinine, ether, 
the bromide of potassium. There is no such remedy 
on which any of the fancy practitioners dare stake his 
reputation. If there were, it would long ago have 
been accepted, though it had beeri flowers of brim- 
stone from the borders of Styx or Cocytus. 

No, my kind listener, you may be certain that if 
you are the patient of a sensible practitioner who be- 
longs to the " old school," if you will call it so, of Hip- 
pocrates and Sydenham, of common sense as well as 
science, he will not be scared by names out of any- 
thing like to help you ; that he will use a cold lotion 
or a hot cataplasm to your inflamed limb, a cool or 
warm drink in your fever, as one or the other may feel 
most comfortable and seem like to do most good, with- 
out troubling himself whether it is according to this 
" pathy " or that " pathy," in the jargon of half-taught 
pretenders. But as your life and health are your own, 
you have a perfect right to invest them in patent med- 
icines and fantastic systems to your heart's content. 
The same right that you have to invest your money in 
tickets to the different gift enterprises, or (if a bache- 
lor) to answer the advertisements of the refined and 
accomplished ladies, twenty-nine years old and under, 
who wish to open a correspondence with middle-aged 
gentlemen of means, with a view to matrimony. 



THE HUMAN BODY AND ITS MANAGEMENT. 237 

Only I would n't if I were you. You say you can- 
not decide between what you choose to consider as 
opposing or rival doctrines or theories. I have ex- 
plained to you that the medical profession have no 
doctrine or theory which prevents them from using 
anything which has been proved useful. They do not 
commonly try the quack medicines on their j)atients ; 
there is no sufficient reason why they should believe 
the advertisements of the commercial remedies. But 
the public tries them very largely ; and if any nos- 
trum proves really and exceptionally efficacious, the 
fact will certainly establish itself, as it did in the case 
of the Eau medicinale^ one of the very few secret rem- 
edies which was ever shown by true experience to pos- 
sess any special virtues. 

On the whole, you will act wisely to adopt the prin- 
ciple that it is better to die in the hands of a regu- 
lar physician than to get well under those of a char- 
latan or fancy practitioner. Wait one moment. I do 
not say that it is better to die of any one disease in 
good hands than to get well of that same disease in 
bad ones. That would be a rather robust assertion. 
But most people must get well of many complaints in 
the course of their lives, and it will be probably rather 
sooner and more comfortably in good than in bad 
hands. Besides, it is a bad thing that an ignorant or 
incompetent person should get the credit of curing 
them. Somebody will have to suffer for it sooner or 
later. On the other hand, as all must die at one time 
or another, it is a good thing that the last function of 
mortality, taking off its garments, should be tenderly 
watched by faithful, intelligent, and instructed profes- 
sional friends. 

And this leads me to say that this last function, in- 



238 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

volving a physiological process or series of processes, 
as has been explained, deserves far more study and at- 
tention on the part of the physician than it has gener- 
ally received. The medical art has performed its duty 
in the face of traditional prejudices, in smoothing the 
bed of anguish to which maternity had been hope- 
lessly condemned. It owes the same assertion of its 
prerogative to the sufferings sometimes attending the 
last period of life. That euthanasia often accorded 
by nature, sometimes prevented by want of harmony 
in the hesitating and awkwardly delaying functions, 
not rarely disturbed by intrusive influences, is a right 
of civilized humanity. The anaesthetics mercifully 
granted to a world grown sensitive in proportion to its 
culture will never have fulfilled their beneficent pur- 
pose until they have done for the scythe of death what 
they have done for the knife of the surgeon and the 
sharper trial hour of woman. 

And with this suggestion, I conclude my brief dis- 
courses. 



VII. 

CINDERS FROM THE ASHES. 

The personal revelations contained in my report of 
certain breakfast-table conversations were so charitably 
listened to and so good-naturedly interpreted, tbat I 
may be in danger of becoming over-communicative. 
Still, I should never have ventured to tell the trivial 
experiences here thrown together, were it not that 
my brief story is illuminated here and there by a 
glimpse of some shining figure that trod the same path 
with me for a time, or crossed it, leaving a momentary 
or lasting brightness in its track. I remember that, 
in furnishing a chamber some years ago, I was struck 
with its dull aspect as I looked round on the black- 
walnut chairs and bedstead and bureau. " Make me 
a large and handsomely wrought gilded handle to the 
key of that dark chest of drawers," I said to the fur- 
nisher. It was done, and that one luminous point re- 
deemed the sombre apartment as the evening star 
glorifies the dusky firmament. So, my loving reader, 
— and to none other can such table-talk as this be ad- 
dressed, — I hope there will be lustre enough in one 
or other of the names with which I shall gild my page 
to redeem the dulness of all that is merely personal 
in my recollections. 

After leaving the school of Dame Prentiss, best re- 
membered by infantine loves, those pretty preludes of 
more serious passions ; by the great forfeit-basket, filled 



240 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

with its miscellaneous waifs and deodands, and by the 
long willow stick by the aid of which the good old 
body, now stricken in years and unwieldy in person, 
could stimulate the sluggish faculties or check the mis- 
chievous sallies of the child most distant from her 
ample chair, — a school where I think my most noted 
schoolmate was the present Bishop of Delaware, — I 
became the pupil of Master William Biglow. This 
generation is not familiar with his title to renown, al- 
though he fills three columns and a half in Mr. Duy- 
ckinck's " Cyclopaedia of American Literature." He 
was a humorist hardly robust enough for more than a 
brief local immortality. I am afraid we were an un- 
distinguished set, for I do not remember anybody 
near a bishop in dignity graduating from our benches. 

At about ten years of age I began going to what we 
always called the " Port School," because it was kept 
at Cambridgeport, a mile from the College. This 
suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, and, being 
much of it marshy and imperfectly reclaimed, had a 
dreary look as compared with the thriving College set- 
tlement. The tenants of the many beautiful mansions 
that have sprung up along Main Street, Harvard Street, 
and Broadway can hardly recall the time when, except 
the " Dana House " and the " Opposition House " and 
the " Clark House," these roads were almost all the 
way bordered by pastures until we reached the " stores " 
of Main Street, or were abreast of that forlorn " First 
Row" of Harvard Street. We called the boys of 
that locality " Port-chucks." They called us " Cam- 
bridge-chucks," but we got along very well together in 
the main. 

Among my schoolmates at the Port School was a 
young girl of singular loveliness. I once before re- 



CINDERS FROM THE ASHES. 241 

ferred to her as "the golden blonde," but did not 
trust myself to describe her charms. The day of her 
appearance in the school was almost as much a revela- 
tion to us boys as the appearance of Miranda was to 
Caliban. Her abounding natural curls were so full of 
sunshine, her skin was so delicately white, her smile 
and her voice were so all-subduing, that half our heads 
were turned. Her fascinations were everywhere con- 
fessed a few years afterwards ; and when I last met 
her, though she said she was a grandmother, 1 ques- 
tioned her statement, for her winning looks and ways 
would still have made her admired in any company. 

Not far from the golden blonde were two small boys, 
one of them very small, perhaps the youngest boy in 
school, both ruddy, sturdy, quiet, reserved, sticking 
loyally by each other, the oldest, however, beginning 
to enter into social relations with us of somewhat ma- 
turer years. One of these two boys was destined to 
be widely known, first in literature, as author of one 
of the most popular books of its time and which is 
freighted for a long voyage ; then as an eminent law- 
yer ; a man who, if his countrymen are wise, will yet 
be prominent in the national councils. Richard Henry 
Dana, Junior, is the name he bore and bears ; he 
found it famous, and will bequeath it a fresh re- 
nown. 

Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among 
the school-girls of unlettered origin by that look which 
rarely fails to betray hereditary and congenital culture, 
was a young person very nearly of my own age. She 
came with the reputation of being " smart," as we 
should have called it, clever as we say nowadays. 
This was Margaret Fuller, the only one among us who, 
like " Jean Paul," like " The Duke," like " Bettina," 



242 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

has slipped tlie cable of tbe more distinctive name to 
which she was anchored, and floats on the waves of 
speech as "Margaret." Her air to her schoolmates 
was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if 
she had other thoughts than theirs and was not of them. 
She was a great student and a great reader of what she 
used to call " ndw-v^ls." I remember her so well as 
she appeared at school and later, that I regret that she 
had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in 
the day of her best looks. None know her aspect who 
have not seen her living. Margaret, as I remember 
her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair complex- 
ioned, with a watery, aqua-marine lustre in her light 
eyes, which she used to make small, as one does who 
looks at the sunshine. A remarkable point about her 
was that long, flexile neck, arching and undulating in 
strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her 
would compare to those of a swan, and one who loved 
her not to those of the ophidian who tempted our com- 
mon mother. Her talk was affluent, magisterial, de Tiaut 
en has, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing the 
talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face kin- 
dled and reddened and dilated in every feature as she 
spoke, and, as I once saw her in a fine storm of indig- 
nation at the supposed ill-treatment of a relative, 
showed itself capable of something resembling what 
Milton calls the viraginian aspect. 

Little incidents bear telling when they recall any- 
thing of such a celebrity as Margaret. I remember 
being greatly awed once, in our school-days, with the 
maturity of one of her expressions. Some themes 
were brought home from the school for examination by 
my father, among them one of hers. I took it up with 
a certain emulous interest (for I fancied at that day 



CINDERS FROM THE ASHES. 243 

that I too had drawn a prize, say a five-dollar one, at 
least, in the great intellectual life-lottery) and read 
the first words. 

" It is a trite remark," she began. 

I stopped. Alas ! I did not know what trite meant. 
How could I ever judge Margaret fairly after such a 
crushing discovery of her superiority ? I doubt if I 
ever did ; yet oh, how pleasant it would have been, at 
about the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over 
these ashes for cinders with her, — she in a snowy cap, 
and I in a decent peruke ! 

After being five years at the Port School, the time 
drew near when I was to enter college. It seemed ad- 
visable to give me a year of higher training, and for 
that end some public school was thought to offer ad- 
vantages. Phillips Academy at Andover was well 
known to us. We had been up there, my father and 
myself, at anniversaries. Some Boston boys of well- 
known and distinguished parentage had been scholars 
there very lately, — Master Edmund Quincj^ Master 
Samuel Hurd Walley, Master Nathaniel Parker Wil- 
lis, — all promising youth, who fulfilled their promise. 

I do not believe there was any thought of getting a 
little respite of quiet by my temporary absence, but I 
have wondered that there was not. Exceptional boys 
of fourteen or fifteen make home a heaven, it is true ; 
hut I have suspected, late in life, that I was not one of 
the exceptional kind. I had tendencies in the direc-= 
tion of flageolets and octave flutes. I had a pistol and 
a gun, and popped at everything that stirred, pretty 
nearly, except the house-cat. Worse than this, I would 
buy a cigar and smoke it by instalments, putting it 
meantime in the barrel of my pistol, by a stroke of 
ingenuity which it gives me a grim pleasure to recall r 



244 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

for no maternal or other female eyes would explore 
the cavity of that dread implement in search of con- 
traband commodities. 

It was settled, then, that I should go to Phillips 
Academy, and preparations were made that I might 
join the school at the beginning of the autumn. 

In due time I took my departure in the old carriage, 
a little modernized from the pattern of my Lady Boun- 
tiful's, and we jogged soberly along, — kind parents 
and slightly nostalgic boy, ■ — towards the seat of learn- 
ing, some twenty miles away. Up the old West Cam- 
bridge road, now North Avenue; past Davenport's 
tavern, with its sheltering tree and swinging sign ; past 
the old powder-house, looking like a colossal conical 
ball set on end ; past the old Tidd House, one of the 
finest of the ante-Revolutionary mansions ; past Miss 
Swan's great square boarding-school, where the music 
of girlish laughter was ringing through the windy cor- 
ridors ; so on to Stoneham, town of the bright lake, 
then darkened with the recent memory of the barbar- 
ous murder done by its lonely shore ; through pleasant 
Reading, with its oddly named village centres, — 
" Trapelo," " Read'nwoodeend," as rustic speech had 
it, and the rest; through Wilmington, then renowned 
for its hops ; so at last into the hallowed borders of the 
academic town. 

It was a shallow, two-story white house before which 
we stopped, just at the entrance of the central village, 
the residence of a very worthy professor in the theo- 
logical seminary, — learned, amiable, exemplary, but 
thought by certain experts to be a little questionable 
in the matter of homoousianism, or some such doctrine. 
There was a great rock that showed its round back in 
the narrow front yard. It looked cold and hard ; but 



CINDERS FROM THE ASHES. 245 

It hinted firmness and indifference to the sentiments fast 
struggling to get uppermost in my youthful bosom ; for 
I was not too old for home-sickness, — who is ? The 
carriage and my fond companions had to leave me at 
last. I saw it go down the declivity that sloped south- 
ward, then climb the next ascent, then sink gradually 
until the window in the back of it disappeared like an 
eye that shuts, and leaves the world dark to some wid- 
owed heart. 

Sea-sickness and home-sickness are hard to deal with 
by any remedy but time. Mine was not a bad case, 
but it excited sympathy. There was an ancient, faded 
old lady in the house, very kindly, but very deaf, rust- 
ling about in dark autumnal foliage of silk or other 
murmurous fabric, somewhat given to snuff, but a very 
worthy gentlewoman of the poor-relation variety. She 
comforted me, I well remember, but not with apples, 
and stayed me, but not with flagons. She went in her 
benevolence, and, taking a blue and white soda-powder, 
mingled the same in water, and encouraged me to drink 
the result. It might be a specific for sea-sickness, but 
it was not for home-sickness. The fiz was a mockery, 
and the saline refrigerant struck a colder chill to my 
despondent heart. I did not disgrace myself, however, 
and a few days cured me, as a week on the water often 
cures sea-sickness. 

There was a sober-faced boy of minute dimensions 
in the house, who began to make some advances to me, 
and who, in spite of all the conditions surrounding him, 
turned out, on better acquaintance, to be one of the 
most amusing, free-spoken, mocking little imps I ever 
met in my life. My room-mate came later. He was 
the son of a clergyman in a neighboring town, — in 
fact I may remark that I knew a good many clergy- 



246 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

men's sons at Andover. He and I went in harness to- 
gether as well as most boys do, I suspect ; and I liave 
no grudge against him, except that once, when I was 
slightly indisposed, he administered to me, — with the 
best intentions, no doubt, — a dose of Indian pills, 
which effectually knocked me out of time, as Mr. 
Morrissey would say, — not quite into eternity, but so 
near it that I perfectly remember one of the good la- 
dies told me (after I had come to my senses a little, 
and was just ready for a sip of cordial and a word 
of encouragement), with that delightful plainness of 
speech wliich so brings realities home to the imagina- 
tion, that " 1 never should look any whiter when I was 
laid out as a corpse." After my room-mate and I had 
been separated twenty-five years, fate made us fellow- 
townsmen and acquaintances once more in Berkshire, 
and now again we are close literary neighbors ; for I 
have just read a very pleasant article, signed by him, 
in the last number of the " Galaxy." Does it not 
sometimes seem as if we were all marching round and 
round in a circle, like the supernumeraries who con- 
stitute the " army " of a theatre, and that each of us 
meets and is met by the same and only the same peo- 
ple, or their doubles, twice, thrice, or a little oftener, 
before the curtain drops and the " army " puts off its 
borrowed clothes ? 

The old Academy building had a dreary look, with 
its flat face, bare and uninteresting as our own " Uni- 
versity Building " at Cambridge, since the piazza which 
relieved its monotony was taken away, and, to balance 
the ugliness thus produced, the hideous projection was 
added to "Harvard Hall." Two masters sat at 
the end of the great room, — the principal and his as- 
sistant. Two others presided in separate rooms, — 



CINDERS FROM THE ASHES. 247 

one of them the late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, an 
excellent and lovable man, who looked kindly on me, 
and for v^^hom I always cherished a sincere regard, — 
a clergyman's son, too, which privilege I did not al- 
ways find the warrant of signal virtues ; but no mat- 
ter about that here, and I have promised myself to be 
amiable. 

On the side of the long room was a large clock-dial, 
bearing these words : — 

YOUTH IS THE SEED-TIME OF LIFE. 

I had indulged in a prejudice, up to that hour, that 
youth was the budding time of life, and this clock-dial, 
perpetually twitting me with its seedy moral, always 
had a forbidding look to my vernal apprehension. 

I was put into a seat with an older and much bigger 
boy, or youth, with a fuliginous complexion, a dilating 
and whitening nostril, and a singularly malignant 
scowl. Many years afterwards he committed an act 
of murderous violence, and ended by going to finish 
his days in a madhouse. His delight was to kick my 
shins with all his might, under the desk, not at all as 
an act of hostility, but as a gratifying and harmless 
pastime. Finding this, so far as I was concerned, 
equally devoid of pleasure and p'rofit, I managed to 
get a seat by another boy, the son of a very distin- 
guished divine. He was bright enough, and more 
select in his choice of recreations, at least during 
school hours, than my late homicidal neighbor. But 
the principal called me up presently, and cautioned 
me against him as a dangerous companion. Could it 
be so ? If the son of that boy's father could not be 
''^rusted, what boy in Christendom could ? It seemed 
like the story of the youth doomed to be slain by a 



248 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

lion before reacliing a certain age, and whose fate 
found him out in the heart of the tower where his 
father had shut him up for safety. Here was I, in the 
very dove's nest of Puritan faith, and out of one of its 
eggs a serpent had been hatched and was trying to 
nestle in my bosom ! I parted from him, however, 
none the worse for his companionship so far as I can 
remember. 

Of the boys who were at school with me at Andover 
one has acquired great distinction among the scholars 
of the land. One day I observed a new boy in a seat not 
very far from my own. He was a little fellow, as I 
recollect him, with black hair and very bright black 
eyes, when at length I got a chance to look at them. 
Of all the new-comers during my whole year he was 
the only one whom the first glance fixed in my memory, 
but there he is now, at this moment, just as he caught 
my eye on the morning of his entrance. His head 
was between his hands (I wonder if he does not some- 
times study in that same posture nowadays !) and his 
eyes were fastened to his book as if he had been read- 
ing a will that made him heir to a million. I feel sure 
that Professor Horatio Balch Hackett will not find 
fault with me for writing his name under this inoffen- 
sive portrait. Thousands of faces and forms that I 
have known more or less familiarly have faded from 
my remembrance, but this presentment of the youth- 
ful student, sitting there entranced over the page of 
his text-book, — the child-father of the distinguished 
scholar that was to be, — is not a picture framed and 
hung up in my mind's gallery, but a fresco on its walls, 
there to remain so long as they hold together. 

My especial intimate was a fine, rosy-faced boy, not 
quite so free of speech as myself, perhaps, but with 



CINDEES FEOM THE ASHES. 249 

qualities that promised a noble manhood, and ripened 
into it in due season. His name was Phinehas Barnes, 
and, if he is inquired after in Portland or anywhere in 
the State of Maine, something will be heard to his ad- 
vantage from any honest and intelligent citizen of that 
Commonwealth who answers the question. This was 
one of two or three friendships that lasted. There 
were other friends and classmates, one of them a nat- 
ural humorist of the liveliest sort, who would have 
been quarantined in any Puritan port, his laugh was 
so potently contagious. 

Of the noted men of Andover the one whom I re- 
member best was Professor Moses Stuart. His house 
was nearly opposite the one in which I resided and I 
often met him and listened to him in the chapel of the 
Seminary. I have seen few more striking figures in 
my life than his, as I remember it. Tall, lean, with 
strong, bold features, a keen, scholarly, accipitrine nose, 
thin, expressive lips, great solemnity and impressive- 
ness of voice and manner, he was my early model of a 
classic orator. His air was Roman, his neck long and 
bare like Cicero's, and his toga^ — that is his broad- 
cloth cloak, — was carried on his arm, whatever might 
have been the weather, with such a statue-like rigid 
grace that he might have been turned into marble as 
he stood, and looked noble by the side of the antiques 
of the Vatican. 

Dr. Porter was an invalid, with the prophetic hand- 
kerchief bundling his throat, and his face " festooned" 
— as I heard Hillard say once, speaking of one of our 
College professors — in folds and wrinkles. Ill health 
gives a certain common character to all faces, as Na- 
ture has a fixed course which she follows in disman- 
tling a human countenance : the noblest and the fairest. 



250 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

is but a death's-head decently covered over for the 
transient ceremony of life, and the drapery often falls 
half off before the procession has passed. 

Dr. Woods looked his creed more decidedly, per- 
haps, than any of the Professors. He had the firm 
fibre of a theological athlete, and lived to be old with- 
out ever mellowing, I think, into a kind of half -hetero- 
doxy, as old ministers of stern creed are said to do 
now and then, — just as old doctors grow to be sparing 
of the more exasperating drugs in their later days. 
He had manipulated the mysteries of the Infinite so 
long and so exhaustively, that he would have seemed 
more at home among the mediaeval schoolmen than 
amidst the working clergy of our own time. 

All schools have their great men, for whose advent 
into life the world is waiting in dumb expectancy. In 
due time the world seizes upon these wondrous youth, 
opens the shell of their possibilities like the valves of 
an oyster, swallows them at a gulp, and they are for 
the most part heard of no more. We had two great 
men, grown up both of them. Which was the more 
awful intellectual power to be launched upon society, 
we debated. Time cut the knot in his rude fashion by 
taking one away early, and padding the other with 
prosperity so that his course was comparatively noise- 
less and ineffective. We had our societies, too ; one 
in particular, " The Social Fraternity," the dread se- 
crets of which I am under a lifelong obligation never 
to reveal. The fate of William Morgan, which the 
community learned not long after this time, reminds 
me of the danger of the ground upon which I am 
treading. 

There were various distractions to make the time 
not passed in study a season of relief. One good lady, 



CINDERS FEOM THE ASHES. 251 

I was told, was in the liabit of asking students to her 
house on Saturday afternoons and praying with and 
for them. Bodily exercise was not, however, entirely 
superseded by spiritual exercises, and a rudimentary 
form of base-ball and the heroic sport of foot-ball were 
followed with some spirit. 

A slight immature boy finds his materials of thought 
and enjoyment in very shallow and simple sources. 
Yet a kind of romance gilds for me the sober table- 
land of that cold New England hill where I came in 
contact with a world so strange to me, and destined to 
leave such mingled and lasting impressions. I looked 
across the valley to the hillside where Methuen hung 
suspended, and dreamed of its wooded seclusion as a 
village paradise. I tripped lightly down the long 
northern slope with facilis descensus on my lips, and 
toiled up again, repeating sed revocare gradum. I 
wandered in the autumnal woods that crown the " In- 
dian Ridge," much wondering at that vast embank- 
ment, which we young philosophers believed with the 
vulgar to be of aboriginal workmanship, not less 
curious, perhaps, since we call it an escar, and refer it 
to alluvial agencies. The little Shawshine was our 
swimming-school, and the great Merrimack, the right 
arm of four toiling cities, was within reach of a morn- 
ing stroll. At home we had the small imp to make us 
laugh at his enormities, for he spared nothing in his 
talk, and was the drollest little living protest against 
the prevailing solemnities of the locality. It did not 
take much to please us, I suspect, and it is a blessing 
that this is apt to be so with young people. What 
else could have made us think it great sport to leave 
our warm beds in the middle of winter and " camp 
out," — on the floor of our room, — with blankets dis- 



252 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

posed tent-wise, except the fact that to a boy a new 
discomfort in place of an old comfort is often a lux- 

More exciting occupation than any of these was to 
watch one of the preceptors to see if he would not 
drop dead while he was praying. He had a dream one 
night that he should, and looked upon it as a warning, 
and told it round very seriously, and asked the boys to 
come and visit him in turn, as one whom they were 
soon to lose. More than one boy kept his eye on him 
during his public devotions, possessed by the same 
feeling the man had who followed V^an Amburgh 
about with the expectation, let us not say the hope, of 
seeing the lion bite his head off sooner or later. 

Let me not forget to recall the interesting visit to 
Haverhill with my room-mate, and how he led me to 
the mighty bridge over the Merrimack which defied 
the ice-rafts of the river ; and to the old meeting- 
house, where, in its porch, I saw the door of the an- 
cient parsonage, with the bullet-hole in it through 
which Benjamin Rolfe, the minister, was shot by the 
Indians on the 29th of August, 1708. What a vision 
it was when I awoke in the morning to see the fog on 
the river seeming as if it wrapped the towers and 
spires of a great city ! — for such was my fancy, and 
whether it was a mirage of youth or a fantastic natural 
effect I hate to inquire too nicely. 

My literary performances at Andover, if any reader 
who may have survived so far cares to know, included 
a translation from Yirgil, out of which I remember 
this couplet, which had the inevitable cockney rhyme 
of beginners : — 

" Thus by the power of Jove's imperial arm 
The boiling ocean trembled into calm." 



CINDERS FROM THE ASHES. 253 

Also a discussion with Master Phinehas Barnes on the 
case of Mary, Queen of Scots, which he treated ar- 
gumentatively and I rhetorically and sentimentally. 
My sentences were praised and his conclusions adopted. 
Also an Essay, spoken at the great final exhibition, 
held in the large hall up-stairs, which hangs oddly 
enough from the roof, suspended by iron rods. Sub- 
ject, Fancy. Treatment, brief but comprehensive, 
illustrating the magic power of that brilliant faculty 
in charming life into forgetfulness of all the ills that 
flesh is heir to, — the gift of Heaven to every condi- 
tion and every clime, from the captive in his dungeon 
to the monarch on his throne ; from the burning sands 
of the desert to the frozen icebergs of the poles, from 
— but I forget myself. 

This was the last of my coruscations at Andover. 
I went from the Academy to Harvard College, and 
did not visit the sacred hill again for a long time. 

On the last day of August, 1867, not having been 
at Andover for many years, I took the cars at noon, 
and in an hour or a little more found myself at the 
station, just at the foot of the hiU. My first pilgrim- 
age was to the old elm, which I remembered so well 
as standing by the tavern, and of which they used to 
tell the story that it held, buried in it by growth, the 
iron rings put round it in the old time to keep the 
Indians from chopping it with their tomahawks. I 
then began the once familiar toil of ascending the 
long declivity. Academic villages seem to change 
very slowly. Once in a hundred years the library 
burns down with all its books. A new edifice or two 
may be put up, and a new library begun in the course 
of the same century ; but these places are poor, for the 



254 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

most part, and cannot afford to pull down their old 
barracks. 

These sentimental journej^s to old haunts must be 
made alone. The story of them must be told suc- 
cinctly. It is like the opium -smoker's showing you 
the pipe from which he has just inhaled elysian bliss, 
empty of the precious extract which has given him his 
dream. 

I did not care much for the new Academy building 
on my right, nor for the new library building on my 
left. But for these it was surprising to see how little 
the scene I remembered in my boyhood had changed. 
The Professors' houses looked just as they used to, and 
the stage-coach landed its passengers at the Mansion 
House as of old. The pale brick seminary buildings 
were behind me on the left, looking as if " Hollis " 
and " Stoughton " had been transplanted from Cam- 
bridge, — carried there in the night by orthodox an- 
gels, perhaps, like the Santa Casa. Away to my 
left again, but abreast of me, was the bleak, bare old 
Academy building ; and in front of me stood un- 
changed the shallow oblong white house where I lived 
a year in the days of James Monroe and of John 
Quincy Adams. 

The ghost of a boy was at my side as I wandered 
among the places he knew so well. I went to the 
front of the house. There was the great rock show- 
ing its broad back in the front yard. I used to crack 
nuts on tJiat^ whispered the small ghost. I looked in 
at the upper window in the farther part of the house. 
/ looked out of that on four long changing seasons, 
said the ghost. I should have liked to explore farther, 
but, while I was looking, one came into the small gar- 
den, or what used to be the garden, in front of the 



CINDEKS FKOM THE ASHES. 255 

house, and I desisted from my investigation and went 
on my way. The apparition that put me and my lit- 
tle ghost to flight had a dressing-gown on its person 
and a gun in its hand. I think it was the dressing- 
gown, and not the gun, which drove me off. 

And now here is the shop, or store, that used to be 
Shipman's, after passing what I think used to be Jon- 
athan Leavitt's bookbindery, and here is the back road 
that will lead me round by the old Academy building. 

Could I believe my i senses when I found that it was 
turned into a gymnasium, and heard the low thunder 
of ninepin balls, and the crash of tumbling pins from 
those precincts ? The little ghost said, Never ! It can- 
not he. But it was. " Have they a billiard-room in 
the upper story ? " I asked myself. " Do the theological 
professors take a hand at all-fours or poker on week- 
days, now and then, and read the secular columns of 
the 'Boston Recorder' on Sundays?" I was demoral- 
ized for the moment, it is plain ; but now that I have 
recovered from the shock, I must say that the fact 
mentioned seems to show a great advance in common 
sense from the notions prevailing in my time. 

I sauntered, — we, rather, my ghost and I, — until 
we came to a broken field where there was quarrying 
and digging going on, — our old base-ball ground, 
hard by the burial-place. There I paused ; and if any 
thoughtful boy who loves to tread in the footsteps that 
another has sown with memories of the time when he 
was young shall follow my footsteps, I need, not ask 
him to rest here awhile, for he will be enchained by 
the noble view before him. Far to the north and 
west the mountains of New Hampshire lifted their 
summits in a long encircling ridge of pale blue waves. 
The day was clear, and every mound and peak traced 



256 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

its outline with perfect definition against the sky. 
This was a sight which had more virtue and refresh- 
ment in it than any aspect of nature that I had looked 
upon, I am afraid I must say for years. I have been 
by the seaside now and then, but the sea is constantly 
busy with its own affairs, running here and there, lis- 
tening to what the winds have to say and getting angry 
with them, always indifferent, often insolent, and 
ready to do a mischief to those who seek its compan- 
ionship. But these still, serene, unchanging moun- 
tains, — Monadnock, Kearsarge, — what memories 
that name recalls ! — and the others, the dateless Pjrr- 
amids of New England, the eternal monuments of her 
ancient race, around which cluster the homes of so 
many of her bravest and hardiest children, — I can 
never look at them without feeling that, vast and re- 
mote and awful as they are, there is a kind of inward 
heat and mufEed throb in their stony cores, that brings 
them into a vague sort of sympathy with human hearts. 
It is more than a year since I have looked on those 
blue mountains, and they " are to me as a feeling " 
now, and have been ever since. 

I had only to pass a wall and I was in the burial- 
ground. It was thinly tenanted as I remember it, but 
now populous with the silent immigrants of more than 
a whole generation. There lay the dead I had left, — 
the two or three students of the Seminary; the son 
of the worthy pair in whose house I lived, for whom 
in those days hearts were still aching, and by whose 
memory the house still seemed haunted. A few up- 
right stones were all that I recollect. But now, 
around them were the monuments of many of the 
dead whom I remembered as living. I doubt if there 
has been a more faithful reader of these graven stones 



CINDERS FROM THE ASHES. 257 

than myself for many a long day. I listened to more 
than one brief sermon from preachers whom I had 
often heard as they thundered their doctrines down 
upon me from the throne-like desk. Now they spoke 
humbly out of the dust, from a narrower pulpit, from 
an older text than any they ever found in Cruden's 
Concordance, but there was an eloquence in their 
voices the listening chapel had never known. There 
were stately monuments and studied inscriptions, but 
none so beautiful, none so touching, as that which hal- 
lows the resting-place of one of the children of the 
very learned Professor Robinson : " Is it well with the 
child ? And she answered. It is well." 

While I was musing amidst these scenes in the mood 
of Hamlet, two old men, as my little ghost called 
them, appeared on the scene to answer to the grave- 
digger and his companion. They christened a moun- 
tain or two for me, " Kearnsarge " among the rest, and 
revived some old recollections, of which the most cu- 
rious was " Basil's Cave." The story was recent, 
when I was there, of one Basil, or Bezill, or Buzzell, 
or whatever his name might have been, a member of 
the Academy, fabulously rich, Orientally extravagant, 
and of more or less lawless habits. He had com- 
manded a cave to be secretly dug, and furnished it 
sumptuously, and there with his companions indulged 
in revelries such as the daylight of that consecrated 
locality had never looked upon. How much truth 
there was in it all I will not pretend to say, but I seem 
to remember stamping over every rock that sounded 
hollow, to question if it were not the roof of what was 
once Basil's Cave. 

The sun was getting far past the meridian, and I 
sought a shelter under which to partake of the hermit 



258 PAGES FROM A^ OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

fare I had brought with me. Following the slope of 
the hill northward behind the cemetery, I found a 
pleasant clump of trees grouped about some rocks, dis- 
posed so as to give a seat, a table, and a shade. I left 
my benediction on this pretty little natural caravansera, 
and a brief record on one of its white birches, hoping 
to visit it again on some sweet summer or auturon day, 

Two scenes remained to look upon, — the Shawshine 
River and the Indian Ridge. The streamlet proved 
to have about the width with which it flowed through 
my memory. The young men and the boys were bath- 
ing in its shallow current, or dressing and undressing 
upon its banks as in the days of old ; the same river, 
only the water changed ; " The same boys, only the 
names and the accidents of local memory different," 
I whispered to my little ghost. 

The Indian Ridge more than equalled what I ex- 
pected of it. It is well worth a long ride to visit. 
The lofty wooded bank is a mile and a half in extent, 
with other ridges in its neighborhood, in general run- 
ning nearly parallel with it, one of them still longer. 
These singular formations are supposed to have been 
built up by the eddies of conflicting currents scatter- 
ing sand and gravel and stones as they swept over the 
continent. But I think they pleased me better when 
I was taught that the Indians built them ; and while 
I thank Professor Hitchcock, I sometimes feel as if I 
should like to found a chair to teach the ignorance of 
what people do not want to know. 

" Two tickets to Boston," I said to the man at the 
station. 

But the little ghost whispered, " When you leave 
this place you leave me behind you.^^ 



CINDEKS PROM THE ASHES. 259 

" One ticket to Boston, if you please. Good by, 
little ghost." 

I believe the boy-shadow still lingers around the 
well-remembered scenes I traversed on that day, and 
that, whenever I revisit them, I shall find him again 
as my companion. 



vin. 

MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MOEALS » 

^^Car il ne faut pas se mdconnaitre, nous sommes automates autanl 
qu'esprit." — Pascal, Pensees, chap. xi. § 4. 

[It is fair to claim for this Essay the license which belongs to all spoken 
addresses. To hold the attention of an audience is the first requisite of 
cverj' such composition ; and for this a more highly colored rhetoric is 
admissible than might please the solitary reader. The cheek of a stage 
heroine will bear a touch of carmine which would hardly improve the 
sober comeliness of the mother of a family at her fireside. 

So too, on public occasions, a wide range of suggestive inquiry, meant 
to stimulate rather than satiate the interest of the listeners, may, with 
some reason, be preferred to that more complete treatment of a narrowly 
limited subject which is liable to prove exhaustive in a double sense. 

In the numerous notes and other additions, I have felt the right to use 
a freedom of expression which some might think out of place before the 
mixed audience of a literary anniversary. The dissentient listener maj' 
find himself in an uneasy position hard to escape from: the dissatisfied 
reader has an easy remedy.] 

As the midnight train rolls into an intermediate sta- 
tion, the conductor's' voice is heard announcing, "Cars 
stop ten minutes for refreshments." The passengers 
snatch a brief ^epast, and go back, refreshed, we will 
hope, to their places. But, while they are at the tables, 
one may be seen going round among the cars with a 
lantern and a hanuner, intent upon a graver business. 
He is clinking the wheels to try if they are sound. His 
task is a humble and simple one : he is no machinist, 
very probably ; but he can cast a ray of light from his 

" An Address delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society 
of Harvard University, June 29j 1870. With notes and after- 
thoughts. 






MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 261 

lantern, and bring out the ring of iron with a tap of his 
hammer. 

Our literary train is stopping for a very brief time 
at its annual station ; and I doubt not it will be re- 
freshed by my youtlif ul colleague before it moves on. 
It is not unlikely that the passengers may stand much in 
need of refreshment before I have done with them : for 
I am the one with the hammer and the lantern ; and I 
am going to clink some of the wheels of this intellectual 
machinery, on the soundness of which we all depend. 
The slenderest glimmer I can lend, the lightest blow 
I can strike, may at least call the attention of abler and 
better-equipped inspectors. 

I ask your attention to some considerations on the 
true mechanical relations of the tliinking principle, and 
to a few hints as to the false mechanical relations which 
have intruded themselves into the sphere of moral self- 
determination. 

I call that part of mental and bodily life mechanical 
which is independent of our volition. The beating 
of our hearts and the secretions of our internal organs 
will go on, without and in spite of any voluntary effort 
of ours, as long as we live. Respiration is partially 
under our control : we can change the rate and special 
mode of breathing, and even hold our breath for a time ; 
but the most determined suicide cannot strangle him- 
self without the aid of a noose or other contrivance 
which shall effect what his mere will cannot do. The 
flow of thought is, like breathing, essentially mechan- 
ical and necessary, but incidentally capable of being 
modified to a greater or less extent by conscious effort. 
Our natural instincts and tastes have a basis which can 
no more be reached by the will than the sense of light 
dnd darkness, or that of heat and cold All these things 



262 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

we feel justified in referring to the great First Cause ; 
they belong to the " laws of Nature," as we call them, 
for which we are not accountable. , 

Whatever may be our opinions as to the relations 
between " mind " and " matter," our observation only 
extends to thought and emotion as connected with the 
living body, and, according to the general verdict of 
consciousness, more especially with certain parts of the 
body; namely, the central organs of the nervous sys- 
tem. The bold language of certain speculative men of 
science has frightened some more cautious persons away 
from a subject as much belonging to natural history as 
the study of any other function in connection with its 
special organ. If Mr. Huxley maintains that his 
thoughts and ours are " the expression of molecular 
changes in that matter of life which is the source of our 
other vital phenomena ; " " if the Rev. Prof. Haughton 
suggests, though in the most guarded way, that "our 
successors may even dare to speculate on the changes 
that converted a crust of bread, or a bottle of wine, in 
the brain of Swift, Moli^re, or Shakespeare, into the 
conception of the gentle Glumdalclitch, the rascally 
Sganarelle, or the immortal Falstaff," * — all this need 
not frighten us from studying the conditions of the 
thinking organ in connection with thought, just as we 
study the eye in its relations to sight. The brain is an 
instrument, necessary, so far as our direct observation 
extends, to thought. The " materialist " believes it to 
be wound up by the ordinary cosmic forces, and to 
give them out again as mental products : '^ the " spirit- 

" On the Physical Basis of Life. New Haven, 1870, p. 261. 
* Medicine in Modern Times. London, 1869, p. 107. 
" " It is by no means generally admitted that the brain is gov- 
erned by the mind. On the contrary, the view entertained by the 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 263 

ualist " believes in a conscious entity, not interchange- 
able with motive force, which plays upon this instru- 
ment. But the instrument must be studied by the one 
as much as by the other : the piano which the master 
touches must be as thoroughly understood as the musical 
box or clock which goes of itself by a spring or weight. 
A slight congestion or softening of the brain shows the 
least materialistic of philosophers that he must recog- 
nize the strict dependence of mind upon its organ in the 
only condition of life with which we are experimentally 
acquainted. And what all recognize as soon as disease 
forces it upon their attention, all thinkers should recog- 
nize, without waiting for such an irresistible demon- 
stration. They should see that the study of the organ 
of thought, microscopically, chemically, experimentally, 
on the lower animals, in individuals and races, in health 
and in disease, in every aspect of external observation, 
as well as by internal consciousness, is just as necessary 
as if mind were known to be nothing more than a func- 
tion of the brain, in the same way as digestion is of the 
stomach. 

These explanations are simply a concession to the 
timidity of those who assume that they who study the 
material conditions of the thinking centre necessarily 
confine the sphere of intelligence to the changes in 
those conditions ; that they consider these changes 
constitute thought ; whereas all that is held may be, 
that they accompany thought. It is a well-ascertained 
fact, for instance, that certain sulphates and phos- 
phates are separated from the blood that goes to the 
brain in increased quantity after severe mental laboro 

best cerebral physiologists is, that the mind is a force developed 
by the action of the brain." — Journal of Psychological Medicine^ 
July, 1870, Editor's (W. A. Hammond) Note, p. 535= 



264 PAGES TROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

But this chemical change may be only one of the fac= 
tors of intellectual action. So, also, it may be true 
that the brain is inscribed with material records of 
thought ; but what that is which reads any such rec- 
ords, remains still an open question. I have meant 
to leave absolutely untouched the endless discussion 
as to the distinctions between '"• mind " and " mat- 
ter," * and confine myself chiefly to some results of 
observation in the sphere of thought, and some sugges- 
tions as to the mental confusion which seems to me a 
common fact in the sphere of morals. 

The central thinking organ is made up of a vast 
number of little starlike bodies embedded in fine gran- 
ular matter, connected with each other by ray-like 
branches in the form of pellucid threads ; the same 
which, wrapped in bundles, become nerves, — the tel- 
egraphic cords of the system. The brain proper is a 
double organ, like that of vision ; its two halves being 
connected by a strong transverse band, which unites 
them like the Siamese twins. The most fastidious 
lover of knowledge may study its general aspect as an 
after-dinner amusement upon an English walnut, 
splitting it through its natural suture, and examining 
either half. The resemblance is a curious freak of 
Nature's, which Cowley has followed out, in his ingen- 
ious, whimsical way, in his fifth " Book of Plants ; " 
thus rendered in the old translation from his original 
Latin : — - 

" Nor can this head-like nut, shaped like the brain 
Within, be said that form by chance to gain : 

" Matter itself has been called " frozen force," and, as Bosco^ 
vich has said, is only known to us as localized points of attrac- 
tion and repulsion. 

f 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MOKALS. 265 

For membranes soft as silk her kernel bind, 
Whereof the inmost is of tenderest kind, 
Like those wliich on the brain of man we find ; 
All which are ui a seam-joined shell inclosed, 
Which of this brain the skull may be supposed," 

The brain must be fed, or it cannot work. Four 
great vessels flood every part of it with hot scarlet 
blood, which carries at once fire and fuel to each of 
its atoms. Stop this supply, and we drop senseless. 
Inhale a few whiffs of ether, and we cross over into 
the unknown world of death with a return ticket ; or 
we prefer chloroform, and perhaps get no return 
ticket. Infuse a few drachms of another fluid into 
the system, and, when it mounts from the stomach to 
the brain, the pessimist becomes an optimist ; the de- 
spairing wretch finds a new heaven and a new earth, 
and laughs and weeps by turns in his brief ecstasy. 
But, so long as a sound brain is supplied with fresh 
blood, it perceives, thinks, wills.'* The father of Eu- 
gene Sue, the novelist, in a former generation, and M. 
Pinel in this, and very recently, have advocated doing 
away with the guillotine, on the ground that the man, 
or the nobler section of him, might be conscious for a 
time after the axe had fallen. We need not believe 
it, nor the story of Charlotte Corday ; still less that 
one of Sir Everard Digby, that when the executioner 
held up his heart to the gaze of the multitude, saying, 
" This is the heart of a traitor I '' the severed head ex- 
claimed, " Thou liest ! " These stories show, however, 
the sense we have that our personality is seated in the 

" That is, acts as the immediate instrument through which 
these phenomena are manifested. So a good watch, in good or- 
der and wound up, tells us the time of day. The making and 
winding-up forces remain to be accounted for. 



266 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

great nervous centre ; and, if physiologists could ex- 
periment on human beings as some of them have done 
on animals, I will content myself with hinting that 
they would have tales to relate which would almost 
rival the legend of St. Denis." 

An abundant supply of blood to a part implies a 
great activity in its functions. The oxygen of the 
blood keeps the brain in a continual state of^ sponta- 
neous combustion. The waste of the organ implies as 
constant a repair. " Every meal is a rescue from 
one death, and lays up for another ; and while we 
think a thought, we die," says Jeremy Taylor. It is 
true of the brain as of other organs : it can only live 
by dying. We must all be born again, atom by atom, 
from hour to hour, or perish all at once beyond re- 
pair.* 

Such is the aspect, seen in a brief glance, of the 

" There is a ghastly literature of the axe and block, of which 
the stories above referred to are specimens. All the express tri- 
als made on the spot after executions m 1803, in 1853, and more 
recently at Beauvais, have afforded only negative results, as 
might be anticipated from the fact that the circulation through 
the brain is instantly arrested ; and Pere Duchesne's eternuer 
dans le sac must pass as a frightful pleasantry. But a distin- 
guished physiological experimenter mformed me that the sepa- 
rated head of a dog, on being injected with fresh blood, man- 
ifested signs of life and intelligence. — See London Quarterly 
Review, vol. Ixxiii. p. 273 et seq. ; also N. Y. Medical Gazette for 
April 9, 1870. The reader who would compare Dr. Johnson's 
opinion of vivisection with Mr. Huxley's recent defence of it may 
consult the Idler, No. 17. 

* It is proper to say here, that the waste occurring in an organ 
is by no means necessarily confined to its stationary elements. 
The blood itself in the organ, and for the time constituting a part 
of it, appears to furnish the larger portion of the fuel, if we may 
call it so, which is acted on by its own oxygen. This, at least, is 
the case with muscle, and is probably so elsewhere. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 267 

great nervous centre. It is constantly receiving mes- 
sages from the senses, and transmitting orders to the 
different organs by the " up and down trains " of the 
nervous influence. It is traversed by continuous lines 
of thought, linked together in sequences which are 
classified under the name of "laws of association." 
The movement of these successions of thought is so 
far a result of mechanism that, though we may modify 
them by an exertion of will, we cannot stop them, and 
remain vacant of all ideas. 

My bucolic friends tell me that our horned cattle 
always keep a cud in their mouths : when they swallow 
one, another immediately replaces it. If the creature 
happens to lose its cud, it must have an artificial one 
given it, or, they assure me, it will pine, and perhaps 
die. Without committing myself to the exactness or 
the interpretation of the statement, I may use it as an 
illustration. Just in the same way, one thought re- 
places another ; and in the same way* the mental cud 
is sometimes lost while one is talking, and he must ask 
his companion to supply its place. " What was I say- 
ing ? " we ask ; and our friend furnishes us with the 
lost word or its equivalent, and the jaws of conversa- 
tion begin grinding again. 

The brain being a double organ, like the eye, we 
naturally ask whether we can think with one side of it, 
as we can see with one eye ; whether the two sides 
commonly work together; whether one side may not 
be stronger than the other ; whether one side may not 
be healthy, and the other diseased,* and what conse- 
quences may follow from these various conditions. 
This is the subject ingeniously treated by Dr. Wigan 
in his work on the duality of the mind. He maintains 
and illustrates by striking facts the independence of 



268 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

the two sides ; which, so far as headache is concerned, 
many of my audience must know from their own ex- 
perience. The left half of the brain, which controls 
the right half of the body, is, he believes, the strong- 
est in all but left-handed persons.* 

The resemblance of the act of intelligence to that of 
vision is remarkably shown in the terms we borrow 
from one to describe the other. We see sl truth ; wg 
throw light on a subject ; we elucidate a proposition ; 
we darken counsel ; we are blinded by prejudice ; we 
take a narrow view of things ; we look at our neighbor 
with a jaundiced eye. These are familiar expres- 
sions ; but we can go much farther. We have intel- 
lectual myopes, near-sighted specialists, and philoso- 
phers who are purblind to all but the distant abstract. 
We have judicial intellects as nearly achromatic as 
the organ of vision, eyes that are color-blind, and minds 
that seem hardly to have the sense of beauty. The 
old brain thinks the world grows worse, as the old 
retina thinks the eyes of needles and the fractions 
in the printed sales of stocks grow smaller. Just as 
the eye seeks to refresh itself by resting on neutral 
tints after looking at brilliant colors, the mind turns 
from the glare of intellectual brilliancy to the solace 
of gentle dulness ; the tranquillizing green of the 
sweet human qualities, which do not make us shade 

" Gratiolet states that the left frontal convolutions are devel- 
oped earlier than the right. Baillarger attributes right-handed- 
ness to the better nutrition of the left hemisphere, in consequence 
of the disposition of the arteries ; Hyrtl, to the larger current of 
blood to the right arm, etc. — See an essay on " Right and Left 
Handedness," in the Journal of Psychological Medicine for July, 
1870, by Thomas Dwight, Jr., M. D.; also "Aphasia and the 
Physiology of Speech," by T. W. Fisher, in the Boston Medical 
and Surgical Jownal for September 22, x870. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 269 

our eyes like the spangles of conversational gymnasts 
dindi figurantes. 

We have a field of vision : have we a field of 
thought ? Before referring to some matters of in- 
dividual experience, I would avail myself of Sir John 
Herschel's apology, that the nature of the subject 
renders such reference inevitable, as it is one that 
can be elucidated only by the individual's putting on 
record his own personal contribution to the stock of 
facts accumulating. 

Our conscious mental action, aside from immediate 
impressions on the senses, is mainly pictured, worded, 
or modulated, as in remembered music ; all, more or 
less, under the influence of the will. In a general 
way, we refer the seat of thinking to the anterior part 
of the head. Pictured thought is in relation with the 
field of yision, which I perceive — as others do, no 
doubt — as a transverse ellipse ; its vertical to its hori- 
zontal diameter about as one to three. We shut our 
eyes to recall a visible object : we see visions by night. 
The bright ellipse becomes a black ground, on which 
ideal images show more distinctly than on the illumi- 
nated one. The form of the mental field of vision is 
illustrated by the fact that we can follow in our idea 
a ship sailing, or a horse running, much farther, with- 
out a sense of effort, than we can a balloon rising. In 
seeing persons, this field of mental vision seems to be 
a little in front of the eyes. Dr. Howe kindly answers 
a letter of inquiry as follows : — 

" Most congenitally-blind persons, when asked with 
what part of the brain they think, answer, that they 
are not conscious of having any brain. 

" I have asked several of the most thoughtful and 
intelligent among our pupils to designate, as nearly as 



270 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

they can, the seat of sensation in thought ; and they 
do so by placing the hand upon the anterior and up- 
per part of the cranium." 

Worded thought is attended with a distinct impulse 
towards the organs of speech : in fact, the effort often 
goes so far, that we " think aloud," as we say.** The 
seat of this form of mental action seems to me to be 
beneath that of pictured thought ; indeed, to follow 
certain nerves downward : so that, as we say, " My 
heart was inr my mouth," we could almost say, " My 
brain is in my mouth." A particular spot has been 
of late pointed out by pathologists, not phrenologists, 
as the seat of the faculty of speech.* I do know that 
our sensations ever point to it. Modulated or mu- 
sical consciousness is to pictiired and worded thought 
as algebra is to geometry and arithmetic. Music has 

" The greater number of readers are probably ia the habit of 
articulating the words mentally. Begioners read syllable by 
syllable. 

" A man must be a poor beast," said Dr. Johnson, " that should 
read no more in quantity than he could utter aloud." There are 
books of which we can exhaust a page of its meaning at a glance ; 
but a man cannot do justice to a poem like Gray's Elegy except 
by the distinct mental articulation of every word. Some persons 
read sentences and paragraphs as children read syllables, taking 
their sense in block, as it were. All instructors who have had 
occasion to consult a text-book at the last moment before enter- 
mg the lecture-room know that clairvoyant state well enough m 
which a page prints itself on their perception as the form of 
types stamped itself on the page. 

We can read aloud, or mentally articulate, and keep up a dis- 
tinct tram of pictured thought, — not so easily two currents of 
worded thought simultaneously : though this can be done to 
some extent ; as, for instance, one may be reading aloud, and in- 
ternally articulating some well-known passage. 

^ A part of the left anterior lobe. — See Dr. Fisher's elaborate 
paper before referred to. « 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 271 

an absolute sensuous significance — tlie woodcliuck 
which used to listen to my friend playing the piano I 
suppose stopped at that ; " but for human beings it 
does not cause a mere sensation, nor an emotion, nor a 
definable intellectual state, though it may excite many 
various emotions and trains of worded or pictured 
thought. But words cannot truly define it : we might 
as well give a man a fiddle, and tell him to play the 
Ten Commandments, as give him a dictionary, and tell 
him to describe the music of " Don Giovanni." 

The nerves of hearing clasp the roots of the brain 
as a creeping vine clings to the bole of an elm. The 
primary seat of musical consciousness seems to be be- 
hind and below that of worded thought ; but it radi- 
ates in all directions, calling up pictures and words, 
as I have said, in endless variety. Indeed, the vari- 
ous mental conditions I have described are so fre- 
quently combined that it takes some trouble to deter- 
mine the locality of each. 

The seat of the will seems to vary with the organ 
through which it is manifested ; to transport itself to 
different parts of the brain, as we may wish to recall 
a picture, a phrase, or a melody ; to throw its force 
on the muscles or the intellectual processes. Like the 
general-in-chief , its place is anywhere in the field of ac- 
tion. It is the least like an instrument of any of our 
faculties ; the farthest removed from our conceptions 
of mechanism and matter, as we commonly define them. 

This is my parsimonious contribution to our knowl- 
edge of the relations existing between mental action 
and space. Others may have had a different expe- 

" For various alleged instances of the power of music over 
different lower animals, — the cow, the stag, mice, serpents, spi- 
ders, — see Dwight's Journal of Music for October 26, 1861. 



272 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

rience ; the great apostle did not know at one time 
whether he was in the body or out of the body : but 
my system of phrenology extends little beyond this 
rudimentary testimony of consciousness. 

When it comes to the relation of mental action and 
time^ we can say with Leibnitz, " Calculemus ;^^ for 
here we can reach quantitative results. The " personal 
equation," or difference in rapidity of recording the 
same occurrence, has been recognized in astronomical 
records since the time of Maskelyne, the royal astron- 
omer ; and is allowed for with the greatest nicety, as 
may be seen, for instance, in Dr. Gould's recent re- 
port on Transatlantic Longitude. More recently, the 
time required in mental processes and in the trans- 
mission of sensation and the motor impulse along 
nerves has been carefully studied by Helmholtz, Fi- 
zeau, Marey, Donders, and others." From forty to 
eighty, a hundred or more feet a second are estimates 
of different observers : so that, as the newspapers have 
been repeating, it would take a whale a second, more 
or less, to feel the stroke of a harpoon in his tail.* 
Compare this with the velocity of galvanic signals, 
which Dr. Gould has found to be from fourteen to 
eighteen thousand miles a second through iron wire on 
poles, and about sixty-seven hundred miles a second 

" See Annual of Scientific Discovery for 1851, 1858, 1863, 1866 ; 
Journal of Anatomy and Physiology^ 2d Series, No. 1, for Novem- 
ber, 1867; Marey, Du Mouvement dans les Fonctions de la Vie, 
p. 430 et seq. 

* Mr. W. Fo Barrett calculates, that as the mind requires one 
tenth of a second to form a conception and act accordingly, and 
as a rifle-buUet would require no more than one thousandth of a 
second to pass through the brain, it could not be felt (An. Sc. 
Biscov. 1866-7, p. 278). A^^Tien Charles XII. was struck dead 
by the cannon-ball, he clapped liis hand on his sword. This, how° 
ever, may have probably been an unconscious reflex action. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MOKALS. 273 

tlirough. the submarine cable. The brain, according 
to Fizeau, takes one tenth of a second to transmit an 
order to the muscles ; and the muscles take one hun- 
dredth of a second in getting into motion. These 
results, such as they are, have been arrived at by ex 
periments on single individuals with a very delicate 
chronometric apparatus. I have myself instituted a 
good many experiments with a more extensive and 
expensive machinery than I think has ever been em-=- 
ployed, — namely, two classes, each of ten intelligent 
students, who with joined hands represented a nervous 
circle of about sixty-six feet : so that a hand-pressure 
transmitted ten tunes round the circle traversed six 
hundred and sixty feet, besides involving one hundred 
perceptions and volitions. My chronometer was a 
" horse-timer," marking quarter-seconds. After some 
practice, my second class gradually reduced the time 
of transmission ten times round, which, like that of the 
first class, had stood at fourteen and fifteen seconds, 
down to ten seconds ; that is, one tenth of a second for 
the passage through the nerves and brain of each in- 
dividual, — less than the least time I have ever seen 
assigned for the whole operation ; no more than Fizeau 
has assigned to the action of the brain alone. The 
mental process of judgment between colors (red, white, 
and green counters), between rough and smooth (com- 
mon paper and sand-paper), between smells (camphor, 
cloves, and assafoetida), took about three and a half 
tenths of a second each ; taste, twice or three times as 
long, on account of the time required to reach the true 
sentient portion of the tongue.* These few results of 

" Some of these results assign a longer time than other observ- 
ers have found to be required. A little practice would materially 
shorten the time, as it did in the other experimento 



274 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

my numerous experiments show tlie rate of working of 
the different parts of the machinery of consciousness. 
Nothing could be easier than to calculate the whole 
number of perceptions and ideas a man could have in 
the course of a life-time.** But, as we think the same 
thing over many millions of times, and as many per- 
sons keep up their social relations by the aid of a vo- 
cabulary of only a few hundred words, or, in the case 
of some very fashionable people, a few scores only, a 
very limited amount of thinking material may corre- 

" " The sensible points of tlie retina, according to Weber and 
Smith, measure no more than the ^-^-qq mch in diameter. If, 
adopting the views of Mr. Solly, we consider the convolutions of 
the brain as made up of an extensive surface of cineritious neur- 
ine, we may estimate the number of ideas, the substrata of which 
may be contamed in a square inch, as not certainly less than 8,000; 
and, as there must be an immense number of square inches of sur- 
face in the gray matter extended through the cerebro-spinal axis 
of man, there is space sufficient for millions." — On the Reflex 
Function of the Brain, by T. M. Laycock, M. D. Brit, and For. 
Med. Review for January, 1845. 

Dr. Hooke, the famous English mathematician and philosopher, 
made a calculation of the number of separate ideas the mind is 
capable of entertaming, which he estimated as 3,155,760,000. — 
Haller, Elementa Physiologice, vol. v. p. 547. The nerve-cells of 
the bram vary in size from yqqq ^^ z\q ^^ ^^ ^^h in diameter 
(Marshall's Physiology, i. 77) ; and the surface of the convolu- 
tions is reckoned by Baillarger at about 670 square inches (Ibid. 
p. 302) ; which, with a depth of one fifth of an inch, would give 
134 cubic inches of cortical substance, and, if the cells average 
T^Vo" ®^ ^^ inch, would allow room in the convolutions for 134,- 
000,000,000 cells. But they are mingled with white nerve-fibres 
and granules. While these calculations illustrate the extreme 
complexity of the bram-substance, they are amusmg rather than 
explanatory of mental phenomena, and belong to the province of 
Science mousseuse, to use the lively expression of a French acade- 
mician at a recent session. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 275 

spond to a full set of organs of sense, and a good de- 
velopment of the muscular system.** 

The time-relation of the sense of vision was illus- 
trated by Newton by the familiar experiment of whirl- 
ing a burning brand, which appears as a circle of fire. 
The duration of associated impressions on the memory 
differs vastly, as we all know, in different individuals. 
But, in uttering distinctly a series of unconnected num- 
bers or letters before a succession of careful listeners, 
I have been surprised to find how generally they break 
down, in trying to repeat them, between seven and ten 
figures or letters ; though here and there an individual 

" The use of slang, or cheap generic terms, as a substitute for 
differentiated specific expressions, is at once a sign and a cause 
of mental atrophy. It is the way in which a lazy adult shifts the 
trouble of finding any exact meaning in his (or her) conversation 
on the other party. If both talkers are indolent, all their talk 
lapses into the vague generalities of early childhood, with the dis- 
advantage of a vulgar phraseology. It is a prevalent social vice 
of the time, as it has been of times that are past. 

" Thus has he (and many more of the same breed, that, I know, 
the drossy age dotes on) only got the tmie of the time, and out- 
ward habit of encounter; a kind of yesty collection, which carries 
them through and through the most fond and winnowed opinions ; 
and do but blow them to their trial, the bubbles are out."-p- 
Hamlet, act v. sc. 2. \ 

Swift says (in the character of Simon Wagstaff, Esq.), spea^k- 
ing of " witty sentences," " For, as long as my memory reaches^ I 
do not recollect one new phrase of importance to have been addpd; 
which defect in us moderns I take to have been occasioned by l>he 
introduction of cant-words in the Teign of King Charles ihe 
Second." — A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Con- 
versation, etc. Introduction. ' 

" English is an expressive language," said Mr. Pinto, " but not 
difficult to master. Its range is limited. It consists, as far as I 
can observe, of four words, — 'nice,' 'jolly,' 'charming,' and 
^ bore ; ' and some grammarians add ' fond.' " — Lothair, chap, 
xxviii. 



276 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

may be depended on for a larger number. Pepys 
mentions a person who could repeat sixty unconnected 
words, forwards or backwards, and perform other won- 
derful feats of memory ; but this was a prodigy.** I 
suspect we have in this and similar trials a very simple 
mental dynamometer which may yet find its place in 
education. 

Do we ever think without knowing that we are think- 
ing ? The question may be disguised so as to look a 
little less paradoxical. Are there any mental proc- 
esses of which we are unconscious at the time, but 
which we recognize as having taken place by finding 
certain results in our minds ? * 

That there are such unconscious mental actions is 
laid down in the strongest terms by Leibnitz, whose 
doctrine reverses the axiom of Descartes into sum^ 
ergo cogito. The existence of unconscious thought is 
maintained by him in terms we might fairly call au- 
dacious, and illustrated by some of the most striking 
facts bearing upon it. The " insensible perceptions," 
he says, are as important in pneumatology as corpus- 
cles are in physics. — It does not follow, he says again, 
that, because we do not perceive thought, it does not 
eiist. — Something goes on in the mind which answers 
tq the circulation of the blood and all the internal move- 
ments of the viscera. — In one word, it is a great source 
of, error to believe that there is no perception in the 
m ind but those of which it is conscious. 

'" This is nothing to tlie story told by Seneca of himself, and 
ftill more of a friend of his, one Fortius Latro (Mendax, it might 
be suggested) ; or to that other relation of Muretus about a cer- 
tain young Corsiean. — See Rees's Cyclopcedia, art. " Memory," 
also Haller's Elem. Phys. v. 548, etc. 

* " Such a process of reasoning is more or less implicit, and 
without the direct and full advertence of the mind exercising it." — >■ 
Jo H. Newman, Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MOKALS. 277 

This is surely a sufficiently explicit and peremptory 
statement of the doctrine, which, under the names of 
" latent consciousness," " obscure perceptions," " the 
hidden soul," " unconscious cerebration," " reflex ac- 
tion of the brain," has been of late years emerging into 
general recognition in treatises of psychology and phys- 
iology. 

His allusion to the circulation of the blood and the 
movements of the viscera, as illustrating his paradox 
of thinking without knowing it, shows that he saw the 
whole analogy of the mysterious intellectual movement 
with that series of reflex actions so fully described 
half a century later by Hartley, whose observations, ob- 
scured by wrong interpretation of the cerebral struc- 
ture, and an insufficient theory of vibrations which he 
borrowed from Newton, are yet a remarkable anticipa- 
tion of many of the ideas of modern physiology, for 
which credit has been given so liberally to Unzer and 
Prochaska. Unconscious activity is the rule with the 
actions most important to life. The lout who lies 
stretched on the tavern-bench, with just mental activity 
enough to keep his pipe from going out, is the uncon- 
scious tenant of a laboratory where such combinations 
are being constantly made as never Wohler or Berthe- 
lot could put together ; where such fabrics are woven, 
such colors dyed, such problems of mechanism solved, 
such a commerce carried on with the elements and 
forces of the outer universe, that the industries of all 
the factories and trading establishments in the world 
are mere indolence and awkwardness and unproduc- 
tiveness compared to the miraculous activities of which 
his lazy bulk is the unheeding centre. All these un- 
conscious or reflex actions take place by a mechanism 
never more simply stated than in the words of Hart- 



278 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ley, as " vibrations which ascend up the sensory nerves 
first, and then are detached down the motory nerves, 
which communicate with these by some common trunk, 
plexus, or ganglion." " The doctrine of Leibnitz, that 
the brain may sometimes act without our taking cog- 
nizance of it, as the heart commonly does, as many in- 
ternal organs always do, seems almost to belong to our 
time. The readers of Hamilton and Mill, of Aber° 
crombie, Laycock, and Maudsley, of Sir John Her- 
schel, of Carpenter, of Lecky, of Dallas, will find many 
variations on the text of Leibnitz, some new illustra- 
tions, a new classification and nomenclature of the 
facts ; but the root of the matter is all to be found in 
his writings. 

I will give some instances of work done in the un- 
derground workshop of thought, — some of them fa- 
miliar to the readers of the authors just mentioned. 

We wish to remember something in the course of 
conversation. No effort of the will can reach it ; but 

** He goes on to draw the distinction between " automatic mo- 
tions of the secondary kind " and those which were originally 
automatic. "The fingers of young children bend upon almost 
every impression which is made upon the palm of the hand; thus 
performing the action of grasping in the original automatic man- 
ner." (" He rastled with my finger, the blank little etc. ! " says the 
hard-swearing but tender-hearted "Kentuck," speaking of the 
new-born babe whose story Mr. Harte has told so touchingly in 
" The Luck of Roaring Camp.") Hartley traces this familiar 
nursery experience onwards, until the original automatic action 
becomes associated with sensations and ideas, and by and by sub- 
ject to the will; and shows still further how this and similar 
actions, by innumerable repetitions, reach another stage, " repass- 
ing through the same degrees in an inverted order, till they be- 
come secondarily automatic on raany occasions, though still per- 
fectly voluntary on some; viz., whensoever an express act of the 
will is exerted." — Obs. on Man, Propositions xix., xxi. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 279 

we say, " Wait a minute, and it will come to me," and 
go on talking. Presently, perhaps some minutes later, 
the idea we are in search of comes all at once into the 
mind, delivered like a prepaid bundle, laid at the door 
of consciousness like a foundling in a basket. How 
it came there we know not. The mind must have been 
at work groping and feeling for it in the dark : it can- 
not have come of itself. Yet, all the while, our con- 
sciousness, so far as we are conscious of our conscious- 
ness, was busy with other thoughts. 

In old persons, there is sometimes a long interval of 
obscure mental action before the answer to a ques- 
tion is evolved. I remember making an inquiry, of 
an ancient man whom I met on the road in a wagon 
with his daughter, about a certain old burial-ground 
which I was visiting. He seemed to listen attentively ; 
but I got no answer. " Wait half a minute or so," 
the daughter said, " and he will tell you." And sure 
enough, after a little time, he answered me, and to the 
point. The delay here, probably, corresponded to what 
machinists call " lost time," or " back lash," in turning 
an old screw, the thread of which is worn. But with- 
in a fortnight, I examined a young man for his degree, 
in whom I noticed a certain regular interval, and a 
pretty long one, between every question and its answer. 
Yet the answer was, in almost every instance, correct, 
when at last it did come. It was an idiosyncrasy, I 
found, which his previous instructors had noticed. I 
do not think the mind knows what it is doing in the 
interval, in such cases. This latent period, during 
which the brain is obscurely at work, may^ perhaps, 
belong to mathematicians more than others. Swift 
said of Sir Isaac Newton, that if one were to ask him 
a question, " he would revolve it in a circle in his brain. 



280 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

round and round and round " (tlie narrator here de- 
scribing a circle on his own forehead), " before he 
could produce an answer." " 

I have often spoken of the same trait in a distin- 
guished friend of my own, remarkable for his mathe- 
matical genius, and compared his sometimes long-de- 
ferred answer to a question, with half a dozen others 
stratified over it, to the thawing-out of the frozen 
words as told of by Baron Munchausen and Rabelais, 
and nobody knows how many others before them. 

I was told, within a week, of a business-man in 
Boston, who, having an important question under con- 
sideration, had given it up for the time as too much 
for him. But he was conscious of an action going on 
in his brain which was so unusual and painful as to 
excite his apprehensions that he was threatened with 
palsy, or something of that sort. After some hours 
of this uneasiness, his perplexity was all at once 
cleared up by the natural solution of his doubt com- 
ing to him, — worked out, as he believed, in that ob- 
scure and troubled interval. 

The cases are numerous where questions have been 
answered, or problems solved, in dreams, or during 
unconscious sleep. Two of our most distinguished 
professors in this institution have had such an experi- 
ence, as they tell me ; and one of them has often as- 
sured me that he never dreams. Somnambulism and 
double-consciousness offer another series of illustrar 
tions. Many of my audience remember a murder 
case, where the accused was successfully defended, on 
the ground of somnambulism, by one of the most brill- 
iant of American lawyers. In the year 1686 a 
brother of Lord Culpeper was indicted at the Old 
" Note to A Voyage to Laputa. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 281 

Bailey for shooting one of the guards, and acquitted 
on the same ground of somnambulism ; that is, an 
unconscious, and therefore irresponsible, state of ac- 
tivity." 

A more familiar instance of unconscious action is 
to be found in what we call " absent " persons, — 
those who, while wide awake, act with an apparent 
purpose, but without really knowing what they are 
doing ; as in La Bruyere's character, who threw his 
glass of wine into the backgammon-board, and swal- 
lowed the dice. 

There are a vast number of movements which we 
perform with perfect regularity while we are thinking 
of something quite different, — " automatic actions of 
the secondary kind," as Hartley calls them, and of 
which he gives various examples. The old woman 
knits ; the young woman stitches, or perhaps plays her 
piano, and yet talks away as if nothing but her tongue 
was busy. Two lovers stroll along side by side, just 
born into the rosy morning of their new life, prattling 
the sweet follies worth all the wisdom that years will 
ever bring them. How much do they think about 
that wonderful problem of balanced progression which 
they solve anew at every step ? 

We are constantly finding results of unperceived 
mental processes in our consciousness. Here is a 
striking instance, which I borrow from a recent num- 
ber of an English journal. It relates to what is con- 
sidered the most interesting period of incubation in 
Sir William Rowan Hamilton's discovery of quater- 
nions. The time was the 15th of October, 1843. On 
that day, he says in a letter to a friend, he was walk- 
ing from his observatory to Dublin with Lady Ham- 
* Dallas, The Gay Science^ i. 324. 



282 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ilton, when, on reacMng Brougham Bridge, he "felt 
the galvanic circle of thought close; and the sparks 
that fell from it were the fundamental relations be- 
tween i, j, k," just as he used them ever afterwards." 

Still another instance of the spontaneous evolution 
of thought we may find in the experience of a great 
poet. When Goethe shut his eyes, and pictured a 
flower to himself, he says that it developed itself be- 
fore him in leaves and blossoms.* The result of the 
mental process appeared as pictured thought, but the 
process itself was automatic and imperceptible. 

There are thoughts that never emerge into con- 
sciousness, which yet make their influence felt among 
the perceptible mental currents, just as the unseen 
planets sway the movements of those which are 
watched and mapped by the astronomer. Old preju- 
dices, that are ashamed to confess themselves, nudge 
our talking thought to utter their magisterial veto. 
In hours of languor, as Mr. Lecky has remarked, the 
beliefs and fancies of obsolete conditions are apt to 
take advantage of us.'' We know very little of the 
contents of our minds until some sudden jar brings 
them to light, as an earthquake that shakes down a 
miser's house brings out the old stockings full of gold, 
and all the hoards that have hid away in holes and 
crannies. 

We not rarely find our personality doubled in our 
dreams, and do battle with ourselves, unconscious that 
we are our own antagonists. Dr. Johnson dreamed 
that he had a contest of wit with an opponent, and got 

" Nature, February 7, 1870, p. 407 ; North Bi ItisJi Review, Sep- 
tember, 1866, p. 57. 

* MuUer's Physiology (Baly's translation), vol. ii. p. 1364. 
" History of Rationalism, ii. 96, note. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS, 283 

the worst of it : of course, he furnished the wit for 
both. Tartini heard the Devil play a wonderful so- 
nata, and set it down on awaking. Who was the 
Devil but Tartini himself ? I remember, in my youth, 
reading verses in a dream, written, as I thought, by a 
rival fledgling of the Muse. They were so far beyond 
my powers, that I despaired of equalling them ; yet I 
must have made them unconsciously as I read them. 
Could I only have remembered them waking ! 

But I must here add another personal experience, 
of which I will say beforehand, — somewhat as honest 
Izaak Walton said of his pike, " This dish of meat is 
too good for any but anglers or very honest men," — 
this story is good only for philosophers and very small 
children. I will merely hint to the former class of 
thinkers, that its moral bears on two points : first, the 
value of our self -estimate, sleeping, — possibly, also, 
waking ; secondly, the significance of general formulae 
when looked at in certain exalted mental conditions. 

I once inhaled a pretty full dose of ether, with the 
determination to put on record, at the earliest moment 
of regaining consciousness, the thought I should find 
uppermost in my mind. The mighty music of the tri- 
umphal march into nothingness reverberated through 
my brain, and filled me with a sense of infinite possi- 
bilities which made me an archangel for the moment. 
The veil of eternity was lifted. The one great truth 
which underlies all human experience, and is the key 
to all the mysteries that philosophy has sought in vain to 
solve, flashed upon me in a sudden revelation. Hence- 
forth all was clear : a few words had lifted my intelli- 
gence to the level of the knowledge of the cherubim. 
As my natural condition returned, I remembered my 
resolution; and, staggering to my desk, I wrote, in 



284 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ill-shaped, straggling characters, the all-embracing 
truth still glimmering in my consciousness. The words 
were these (children may smile ; the wise will ponder) : 
" A strong smell of turpentine prevails throughout^ ^ 

My digression has served at least to illustrate the 
radical change which a slight material cause may pro- 
duce in our thoughts, and the way we think about them. 
If the state just described were prolonged, it would be 
called insanity.* I have no doubt that there are many 
ill-organized, perhaps over-organized, human brains, 
to which the common air is what the vapor of ether 
was to mine : it is madness to them to drink in this 
terrible burning oxygen at every breath ; and the at- 
mosphere that enfolds them is like the flaming shirt of 
Nessus. 

The more we examine the mechanism of thought, 
the more we shall see that the automatic, unconscious 

" Sir Humphry Davy has related an experience, which I had 
forgotten when I recorded my own. After inhaling nitrous-oxide 
gas, he says, " With the most intense belief and prophetic man- 
ner, I exclaimed to Dr. Kingslake, ' Nothing exists but thoughts. 
The universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures, and 
pains.'"— Works, London, 1839, vol. iii. p. 290. 

* We are often insane at the moment of awaking from sleep. 
" ' I have desired Apronia to be always careful, especially about 
the legs.' Pray, do you see any such great wit in that sentence ? 
I must freely own that I do not. Pray, read it over again, and 
consider it. Why — ay — you must know that I dreamed it just 
now, and waked with it in my mouth. Are you bit, or are you 
not, sirrahs ? " — Swift's Journal to Stella, letter xv. 

Even when wide awake, so keen and robust a mind as Swift's 
was capable of a strange momentary aberration in the days of its 
full vigor. " I have my mouth full of water, and was going to 
spit it out, because I reasoned with myself, * How could I write 
when my mouth was full ? ' Have you not done things like that, 
■ — reasoned wrong at first thinking ? " — Ihid., letter viii. 

All of us must have had similar experiences. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 285 

action of the mind enters largely into all its processes. 
Our definite ideas are stepping-stones ; how we get 
from one to the other, we do not know : something 
carries us ; we do not take the step. A creating and 
informing spirit which is with us, and not of us, is rec- 
ognized everywhere in real and in storied life. It is the 
Zeus that kindled the rage of Achilles ; it is the Muse 
of Homer ; it is the Daimon of Socrates ; it is the 
inspiration of the seer ; it is the mocking devil that 
whispers to Margaret as she kneels at the altar ; and 
the hobgoblin that cried, "Sell him, sell him ! " in the 
ear of John Bunyan : it shaped the forms that filled 
the soul of Michael Angelo when he saw the figure of 
the great Lawgiver in the yet unhewn marble, and the 
dome of the world's yet unbuilt basilica against the 
blank horizon ; it comes to the least of us, as a voice 
that will be heard ; it tells us what we must believe ; 
it frames our sentences ; it lends a sudden gleam of 
sense or eloquence to the dullest of us all, so that, like 
Katterfelto with his hair on end, we wonder at our- 
selves, or rather not at ourselves, but at this divine 
visitor, who chooses our brain as his dwelling-place, 
and invests our naked thought with the purple of the 
kings of speech or song. 

After all, the mystery of unconscious mental action 
is exemplified, as I have said, in every act of mental 
association. What happens when one idea brings up 
another ? Some internal movement, of which we are 
wholly unconscious, and which we only know by its 
effect. What is this action, which in Dame Quickly 
agglutinates contiguous circumstances by their sur- 
faces ; in men of wit and fancy, connects remote ideas 
by partial resemblances ; in men of imagination, by 
the vital identity which underlies phenomenal diver- 



286 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OE LIFE. 

sity ; in the man of science, groups the objects of 
thought in sequences of maximum resemblance ? Not 
one of them can answer. There is a Delphi and a 
Pythoness in every human breast. 

The poet sits down to his desk with an odd conceit 
in his brain; and presently his eyes fill with tears, 
his thought slides into the minor key, and his heart is 
full of sad and plaintive melodies. Or he goes to his 
work, saying, " To-night I would have tears ; " and, 
before he rises from his table he has written a bur- 
lesque, such as he might think fit to send to one of the 
comic papers," if these were not so commonly ceme- 
teries of hilarity interspersed with cenotaphs of wit 
and humor. These strange hysterics of the intelli- 
gence, which make us pass from weeping to laughter, 
and from laughter back again to weeping, must be 
familiar to every impressible nature ; and all is as au- 
tomatic, involuntary, as entirely self -evolved by a hid- 
den organic process, as are the changing moods of the 
laughing and crying woman. The poet always rec- 
ognizes a dictation ah extra ; and we hardly think it 
a figure of speech when we talk of his inspiration. 

The mental attitude of the poet while writing, if I 
may venture to define it, is that of the " nun breath- 
less- with adoration." Mental stillness is the first con- 
dition of the listening state ; and I think my friends 
the poets will recognize that the sense of effort, which 
is often felt, accompanies the mental spasm by which 
the mind is maintained in a state at once passive to 
the influx from without, and active in seizing only 
that which will serve its purpose." It is not strange 

" Burns tells us how he composed verses for a given tune i — 

" My way is, I consider the poetic sentiment correspondent to 

my idea of the musical expression ; then choose my theme ; be- 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 287 

that remembered ideas should often take advantage of 
the crowd of thoughts, and smuggle themselves in as 
original. Honest thinkers are always stealing uncon- 
sciously from each other. Our minds are full of waifs 
and estrays which we think are our own. Innocent 
plagiarism turns up everywhere. Our best musical 
critic tells me that a few notes of the air of " Shoo 
Fly" are borrowed from a movement in one of the 
magnificent harmonies of Beethoven." 

gin one stanza. When that is composed, which is generally the 
most difficult part of the busmess, I walk out, sit down now and 
then, look out for objects in Nature that are in unison or harmony 
with the cogitations of my fancy, and workings of my bosom ; 
humming every now and then the air with the verses I have 
framed. When I feel my Muse beguming to jade, I retire to 
the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions 
to paper ; swmgmg at intervals on the hind-legs of my elbow- 
chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my 
pen goes on." — Letters to G. Thomson, No. xxxvii. 

" One or two mstances where the same idea is fomid in differ- 
ent authors may be worth mentioning i:i illustration of the re- 
mark just made. We are familiar with the saying, that the 
latest days are the old age of the world. 

Mr. Lewes finds this m Lord Bacon's writmgs, ia Roger Ba^ 
con's also, and traces it back as far as Seneca. I find it in Pascal 
(Preface sur le Traite du Vide) ; and Hobbes says, " If we will 
reverence the ages, the present is the oldest." So, too, Tenny- 
son : — 

" For we are ancients of the earth, 
And in the morning of the times." 

The Day-Dream: U Envoi. 

Here are several forms of another familiar thought : — 

" And what if all of animated nature 
Be but organic harps diversely framed, 
That tremble into thought as o'er them sweeps, 
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, 
At once the soul of each, and God of all ? " 

Coleridge, Tke ^olian Harp-. 

**Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the ^olian harp, 



288 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

And SO the orator, — I do not mean the poor slave 
of a manuscript, who takes his thought chilled and 
stiffened from its mould, but the impassioned speaker 
who pours it forth as it flows coruscating from the fur- 
nace, — the orator only becomes om' master at the 
moment when he himself is surprised, captured, taken 
possession of, by a sudden rush of fresh inspiration. 
How well we know the flash of the eye, the thrill of 
the voice, which are the signature and symbol of nas- 
cent thought, — thought just emerging into conscious- 
ness, in which condition, as is the case with the chem- 
ist's elements, it has a combining force at other times 
wholly unknown ! 

passive, takes the impression of tlie passing accident ? " — Burns 
to Mrs. Dunlop, letter 148. 

" Un seul esprit, qui est universel et qui anime tout I'univers, 
— comme on menie souffle de vent fait sonner differenunent di- 
vers tuyaux d'orgue." — Leibnitz, Considerations sur la Doctrine 
(fun Esprit Universel. 

Literature is full of such coincidences, which some love to be- 
lieve plagiarisms. There are thoughts always abroad in the air, 
which it takes more wit to avoid than to hit upon, as the solitary 
" Address without a Phcenix " may remind those critical ant-eat- 
ers whose aggressive feature is drawn to too fine a point. 

Old stories reproduce themselves m a singular way, — not only 
in such authors as Mr. Joseph Miller, but among those whom we 
cannot for a moment suspect of conscious misappropriation. 
Here is an instance forced upon my attention. In the preface 
to The Guardian Angel, I quoted a story from Sprague's " An- 
nals of the American Pulpit," which is there spoken of as be- 
ing told, by Jonathan Edwards the younger, of a brutal fellow 
in New Haven. Some one found a similar story in a German 
novel, and mentioned the coincidence. The true origmal, to 
which I was directed by Dr. Elam's book, A Physician's Prob- 
lems, is to be found in the seventh chapter of the seventh book 
of Aristotle's Ethics. My Latin version renders it thus : " Et 
qui a filio trahebatur trahendi finem jubebat ad foreis, nam a se 
quoque ad hunc locum patrem suum. tractum esse." 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 289 

But W8 are all more or less improvisators. We all 
have a double, who is wiser and better than we are, 
and who puts thoughts into our heads, and words into 
our mouths. Do we not all commune with our own 
hearts upon our beds ? Do we not all divide our- 
selves, and go to buffets on questions of right or 
wrong, of wisdom or folly ? Who or what is it that 
resolves the stately parliament of the day, with all its 
forms and conventionalities and pretences, and the 
great Me presiding, into the committee of the whole, 
with Conscience in the chair, that holds its solemn 
session through the w^atches of the night ? 

Persons who talk most do not always think most. 
I question whether persons who think most — that is, 
have most conscious thought pass through their minds 
— necessarily do most mental work. The tree you 
are sticking in " will be growing when you are 
sleeping." So with every new idea that is planted in 
a real thinker's mind : it will be growing when he is 
least conscious of it. An idea in the brain is not a 
legend carved on a marble slab : it is an impression 
made on a living tissue, which is the seat of active 
nutritive processes. Shall the initials I carved in 
bark increase from year to year with the tree ? and 
shall not my recorded thought develop into new forms 
and relations with my growing brain ? Mr. W^ebster 
told one of our greatest scholars that he had to change 
the size of his hat every few years. His head grew 
larger as his intellect expanded. Illustrations of this 
same fact were shown me many years ago by Mr. De- 
ville, the famous phrenologist, in London. But or- 
ganic mentah changes may take place in shorter spaces 
of time. A single night of sleep has often brought a 
sober second-thought, which was a surprise to the 



290 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

hasty conclusion of the day before. Lord Polkom- 
met's description of the way he prepared himself for 
a judicial decision is in point, except for the alcoholic 
fertilizer he employed in planting his ideas : " Ye see, 
I first read a' the pleadings ; and then, after letting 
them wamble in my wame wi' the toddy two or three 
days, I gie my ain interlocutor." ^ 

The counterpart of this slow process is found in the 
ready, spontaneous, automatic, self-sustaining, contin- 
uous flow of thought, well illustrated in a certain form 
of dialogue, which seems to be in a measure peculiar 
to the female sex. The sternest of our sisters will, I 
hope, forgive me for telling the way in which this cu- 
rious fact was forced upon my notice. 

I was passing through a somewhat obscure street at 
the west end of our city a year or two since, when my 
attention was attracted to a narrow court by a sound 
of voices and a small crowd of listeners. From two 
open windows on the opposite sides of the court pro- 
jected the heads, and a considerable portion of the 
persons, of two of the sex in question, — natives, both 
of them, apparently, of the green isle famous for 
shamrocks and shillalahs. They were engaged in ar- 
gument, if that is argument in which each of the two 
parties develops his proposition without the least re- 
gard to what the other is at the same time saying. 
The question involved was the personal, social, moral, 
and, in short, total standing and merit of the two con- 
troversialists and their respective families. But the 
strange phenomenon was this : The two women, as if 
by preconcerted agreement, like two instruments play- 
ing a tune in unison, were pouring forth simultane- 

" Dean Ramsay's Reminiscences of Scottish Life and CharaC' 
ter, pc 126, 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 291 

ou^^.ly a calm, steady, smooth-flowing stream of mutual 
undervaluation, to apply a mild phrase to it ; never 
stopping for punctuation, and barely giving themselves 
time to get breath between its long-drawn clauses. 
The dialogue included every conceivable taunt which 
might rouse the fury of a sensitive mother of a fam- 
ily, whose allegiance to her lord, and pride in her off- 
spring, were points which it displeased her to have 
lightly handled. I stood' and listened like the quiet 
groups in the more immediate neighborhood. I looked 
for some explosion of violence, for a screaming volley 
of oaths, for an hysteric burst of tears, perhaps for a 
missile of more questionable character than an epithet 
aimed at the head and shoulders projecting opposite. 
" At any rate," I thought, " their tongues will soon 
run down; for it is not in human nature that such a 
flow of scalding rhetoric can be kept up very long." 
But I stood waiting until I was tired ; and, with lahi- 
tur et lahetur on my lij)s, I left them pursuing the 
even tenor, or treble, of their way in a duet which 
seemed as if it might go on until nightfall. 

I came away thinking I had discovered a new na- 
tional custom, as peculiar, and probably as limited, as 
the Corsican vendetta. But I have since found that 
the same scolding duets take place between the women 
in an African kraal. A couple of them will thrust 
their bodies half out of their huts, and exhaust the 
vocabulary of the native Worcester and Webster to 
each other's detriment, while the bystanders listen with 
a sympathy which often leads to a general disturbance.'^ 
And I find that Homer was before us all in noticing 
this curious logomachy of the unwarlike sex. ^neas 

" Uncivilized Races of Men, by Rev. J. G. Wood, vol. i. p 
213. 



292 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

says to Achilles after an immensely long-winded dis- 
course, which Creiisa could hardly have outdone, — - 

" But why in wordy and contentious strife 
Need we each other scold, as women use, 
Who, with some heart-consuming anger wroth, 
Stand in the street, and call each other names. 
Some true, some false; for so their rage commands? "" 

I confess that the recollection of the two women, drift= 
ing upon their vocabularies * as on a shoreless ocean, 
filled me at first with apprehension as to the possible 
future of our legislative assemblies. But, in Aaew of 
what our own sex accomplishes in the line of mutual 
vituperation, perhaps the feminine arrangement, by 
which the two save time by speaking at once, and it is 
alike impossible for either to hear the other, and for 
the audience to hear them both, might be considered 
an improvement. 

The automatic flow of thought is often singularly 
favored by the fact of listening to a weak, continuous 
discourse, with just enough ideas in it to keep the 
mind busy on something else. The induced current of 
thought is often rapid and brilliant in the inverse ratio 
of the force of the inducing current. 

The vast amount of blood sent to the brain implies 
a corresponding amount of material activity in the or- 
gan. In point of fact, numerous experiments have 
shown (and I may refer particularly to those of our 
own countrymen, — Professors Flint, Hammond, and 
Lombard) that the brain is the seat of constant nu- 

* Iliad, XX. 251-255. And Tennyson speaks of 

" Those detestable 
That let the bantling scald at home, and brawl 
Their rights or wrongs like pot-herbs in the street." 

The Princess, 323. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 293 

tritive changes, which are greatly increased by mental 
exertion. 

The mechanical co-efficient of mental action may 
be therefore considered a molecular movement in the 
nervous centres, attended with waste of material con- 
veyed thither in the form of blood, — not a mere 
tremor like the quiver of a bell, but a process more 
like combustion ; the blood carrying off the oxidated 
particles, and bringing in fresh matter to take their 
place. 

This part of the complex process must, of course, 
enter into the category of the correlated forces. The 
brain must be fed in order to work ; and according to 
the amount of waste of material will be that of the 
food required to repair losses. So much logic, so 
much beef ; so much poetry, so much pudding : and, 
as we all know that all growing things are but sponges 
soaked full of old sunshine, Apollo becomes as impor- 
tant in the world of letters as ever." 

But the intellectual product does not belong to the 
category of force at all, as defined by physicists. It 
does not answer their definition as " that which is ex- 
pended in producing or resisting motion." It is not 
reconvertible into other forms of force. One cannot 
lift a weight with a logical demonstration, or make 
a tea-kettle boil by writing an ode to it. A given 
amount of molecular action in two brains represents a 
certain equivalent of food, but by no means an equiva- 
lent of intellectual product. Bavius and Msevius were 
very probably as good feeders as Virgil and Horace, 
and wasted as much brain-tissue in producing their 

" It is curious to compare the Laputan idea of extracting sun- 
beams from cucumbers with George Stephenson's famous saying 
about coal. 



294 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

carmina as the two great masters wasted in producing 
theirs. It may be doubted whether the present Lau- 
reate of England consumed more oxidable material in 
the shape of nourishment for every page of " Maud " 
or of "In Memoriam" than his predecessor Nahum 
Tate, whose masterpiece gets no better eulogy than 
that it is " the least miserable of his productions," in 
eliminating an equal amount of verse." 

As mental labor, in distinction from the passive flow 
of thought, implies an exercise of will, and as mental 
labor is shown to be attended by an increased waste, 
the presumption is that this waste is in some degree 
referable to the material requirements of the act of vo- 
lition. We see why the latter should be attended by 
a sense of effort, and followed by a feeling of fatigue. 

A question is suggested by the definition of the phys- 
icists. What is that which changes the form of force? 
Electricity leaves what we call magnetism in iron, 
after passing through it : what name shall we give to 
that virtue in iron which causes the force we know as 
electricity thus to manifest itself by a precipitate, so to 
speak, of new properties ? Why may we not speak of 
a visferrea as causing the change in consequence of 
which a bar through which an electrical current has 
flowed becomes capable of attracting iron and of mag- 

" " Sur un meme papier, avec la meme plume et la meme en- 
cre, en remuant tant soit peu le bout de la plume en certaine 
fa9on, vous tracez des lettres qui font imaginer des combats, des 
tempetes, ou des furies a ceux qui les lisent, et qui les rendent in- 
dignes ou tristes; au lieu que si vous remuez la plume d'une 
autre fa^on presque semblable, la seule difference qui sera en ce 
peu de mouvement leur pent donner des pensees toutes contraires, 
comme de paix, de repos, de douceur, et exciter en eux des pas- 
sions d'amour et de joie." — Descartes, Principes de Philosophiei 
leme Partie, § 197. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 295 

netizing a million other bars ? And so wliy may not 
a particular brain, through which certain nutritious 
currents have flowed, fix a force derived from these 
currents in virtue of a vis Platonica or a 'u is Bacon- 
ica, and thus become a magnet in the universe of 
thought, exercising and imparting an influence which 
is not expended, in addition to that accounted for by 
the series of molecular changes in the thinking organ? 

We must not forget that force-equivalent is one 
thing, and quality of force-product is quite a different 
thing. The same outlay of muscular exertion turns 
the winch of a coffee-mill and of a hand-organ. It has 
been said that thought cannot be a physical force, be- 
cause it cannot be measured. An attempt has been 
made to measure thought as we measure force. I 
have two tables, one from the " Annales Encyclope- 
diques," and another, earlier and less minute, by the 
poet Akenside, in which the poets are classified accord_ 
ing to their distinctive qualities ; each quality and the 
total average being marked on a scale of twenty as a 
maximum. I am not sure that mental qualities are 
not as susceptible of measurement as the aurora bore- 
alis or the changes of the weather. But even measura- 
ble quality has no more to do with the correlation of 
forces than the color of a horse with his power of 
draught ; and it is with quality we more especially 
deal in intellect and morals. 

I have spoken of the material or physiological co- 
efficient of thought as being indispensable for its ex- 
ercise during the only condition of existence of which, 
apart from any alleged spiritualistic experience, we 
have any personal knowledge. We know our depend- 
ence too well from seeing so many gallant and well- 
freighted minds towed in helpless after a certain time 



296 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

of service, — razees at sixty, dismantled at seventy, 
going to pieces and sinking at fourscore. We recog- 
nize in ourselves the loss of mental power, slight or 
serious, from grave or trifling causes. " Good God," 
said Swift, " what a genius I had when I wrote that 
book ! " And I remember that an ingenious tailor of 
the neighboring city, on seeing a customer leave his 
shop without purchasing, exclaimed, smiting his fore- 
head, " If it had not been for this — emphatically char- 
acterized — headache, I 'd have had a coat on that man 
before he'd got out over my doorstep." Such is the 
delicate adjustment of the intellectual apparatus by 
the aid of which we clothe our neighbor, whether he 
will or no, with our thoughts if we are writers of books, 
with our garments if we are artificers of habiliments. 

The problem of memory is closely connected with 
the question of the mechanical relation between 
thought and structure. How intimate is the alliance 
of memory with the material condition of the brain, is 
shown by the effect of age, of disease, of a blow, of in- 
toxication. I have known an aged person repeat the 
same question ^ve, six, or seven times during the same 
brief visit. Everybod}^ knows the archbishop's flavor 
of apoplexy in the memory as in the other mental pow- 
ers. I was once asked to see to a woman who had just 
been injured in the street. On coming to herself, 
" Where am I ? what has happened ? " she asked. 
" Knocked down by a horse, ma'am ; stunned a little : 
that is all." A pause, "while one with moderate 
haste might count a hundred ; " and then again, 
" Where am I ? what has happened ? " — " Knocked 
down by a horse, ma'am ; stunned a little : that is all." 
Another pause, and the same question again ; and so 
on during the whole time I was by her. The same 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 297 

tendency to repeat a question indefinitely has been ob- 
served in returning members of those worshipping as- 
semblies whose favorite hymn is, " We won't go home 
till morning." 

Is memory, then, a material record ? Is the brain, 
like the rocks of the Sinaitic Valley, written all over 
with inscriptions left by the long caravans of thought, 
as they have passed year after year through its mys- 
terious recesses ? 

When we see a distant rail way- train sliding by us 
in the same line, day after day, we infer the existence 
of a track which guides it. So, when some dear old 
friend begins that story we remember so well ; switch- 
ing off at the accustomed point of digression ; coming 
to a dead stop at the puzzling question of chronology ; 
off the track on the matter of its being first or second 
cousin of somebody's aunt ; set on it again by the 
patient, listening wife, who knows it all as she knows 
her well-worn wedding-ring, — how can we doubt that 
there is a track laid down for the story in some per- 
manent disposition of the thinking-marrow ? 

I need not say that no microscope can find the tab- 
let inscribed with the names of early loves, the stains 
left by tears of sorrow or contrition, the rent where 
the thunderbolt of passion has fallen, or any legible 
token that such experiences have formed a part of the 
life of the mortal, the vacant temple of whose thought 
it is exploring. It is only as an inference, aided by 
an illustration which I will presently offer, that I sug- 
gest the possible existence, in the very substance of 
the brain-tissue, of those inscriptions which Shake- 
speare must have thought of when he wrote, — 

" Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow ; 
Raze out the written troubles of the brain." 



298 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

The objection to the existence of such a material rec- 
ord — that we renew our bodies many scores of times, 
and yet retain our earliest recollections — is entirely 
met by the fact, that a scar of any kind holds its own 
pretty nearly through life in spite of all these same 
changes, as we have not far to look to find instances. 

It must be remembered that a billion of the starry 
brain-cells could be packed in a cubic inch, and that 
the convolutions contain one hundred and thirty-four 
cubic inches, according to the estimate already given. 
My illustration is derived from microscopic photogra- 
phy. I have a glass slide on which is a minute pho- 
tographic picture, which is exactly covered when the 
head of a small pin is laid upon it. In that little 
speck are clearly to be seen, by a proper magnifying 
power, the following objects : the Declaration of In- 
dependence, with easily -recognized facsimile auto- 
graphs of all the signers ; the arms of all the original 
thirteen States ; the Capitol at Washington ; and very 
good portraits of all the Presidents of the United 
States from Washington to Polk. These objects are 
all distinguishable as a group with a power of fifty 
diameters : with a power of three hundred, any one 
of them becomes a sizable picture. You may see, if 
you will, the majesty of Washington on his noble fea- 
tures, or the will of Jackson in those hard lines of the 
long face, crowned with that bristling head of hair in 
a perpetual state of electrical divergence and centri- 
fugal self-assertion. Remember that each of these 
faces is the record of a life. 

Now recollect that there was an interval between 
the exposure of the negative in the camera and its de- 
velopment by pouring a wash over it, when all these 
pictured objects existed potentially, but absolutely in- 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 299 

visible, and incapable of recognition, in a speck of 
collodion-film, which a pin's head would cover, and 
then think what Alexandrian libraries, what Congres- 
sional document-loads of positively intelligible char- 
acters, — such as one look of the recording angel 
would bring out ; many of which we can ourselves 
develop at will, or which come before our eyes unbid- 
den, like " Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin," — might 
be held in those convolutions of the brain which wrap 
the talent intrusted to i^s, too often as the folded nap- 
kin of the slothful servant hid the treasure his master 
had lent him ! " 

Three facts, so familiar that I need only allude to 
them, show how much more is recorded in the memory 
than we may ever take cognizance of. The first is the 
conviction of having been in the same precise circum- 
stances once or many times before. Dr« Wigan says, 
never but once ; but such is not my experiencCo The 
second is the panorama of their past lives, said, by 
people rescued from drowning, to have flashed before 
them.* I had it once myself, accompanied by an ig- 

" " Eas mutationes in sensorio conservatas, ideas multi, nos ves- 
tigia rerum vocabimus, quae non in mente sed in ipso corpore, et 
in niedulla quidem cerebri ineffabili modo incredibiliter minutis 
notis et copia infinita inscriptse sunt." — Haller, quoted by Dr. 
Laycock, Brit, and For. Med. Rev. xix. 310. 

" Different matters are arranged in my head," said Napoleon, 
" as iu drawers. I open one drawer, and close another, as I wish. 
I have never been kept awake by an involuntary preoccupation 
of the mind. If I desire repose, I shut up all the drawers, and 
sleep. I have always slept when I wanted rest, and almost at 
will." — Tahle-Talk and Opinions of Napoleon Buonaparte j Lon- 
don, 1869, p. 10. 

* The following story is related as fact, I condense it from 
the newspaper account, 

" A, held a bond agaiust B. for several hundred dollars. When 



300 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

noble ducking and scrambling self-rescue. The third 
is the revival of apparently obsolete impressions, of 
which many strange cases are related in nervous young 
women and in dying persons, and which the story of 
the dog Argus in the " Odyssey," and of the parrot so 
charmingly told by Campbell, would lead us to sup- 
pose not of rare occurrence in animals." It is possible, 
therefore, and I have tried to show that it is not im- 
probable, that memory is a material record ; that the 
brain is scarred and seamed with infinitesimal hiero- 

it came due, lie searched for it, but could not find it. He told 
the facts to B., who denied having given the bond, and iutimated 
a fraudulent design on the part of A., who was compelled to sub- 
mit to his loss and the charge against him. Years afterwards, A. 
was bathing in Charles River, when he was seized with cramp, 
and nearly drowned. On coming to his senses he went to his 
bookcase, took out a book, and from between its leaves took the 
missing bond. In the sudden picture of his entire life, which 
flashed before him as he was sinking, the act of puttmg the bond 
in the book, and the book in the bookcase, had represented it- 
seH." 

The reader who likes to hear the whole of a story may be 
pleased to ]earn that the debt was paid with interest. 

" " A troop of cavalry which had served on the Continent was 
disbanded in York. Sir Robert Clayton turned out the old 
horses in Knavesmire to have their run for life. One day, while 
grazing promiscuously and apart from each other, a storm gath- 
ered; and, when the thunder pealed and the lightning flashed, 
they were seen to get together, and form in line, in almost as 
perfect order as if they had had their old masters on their backs." 

— Laycock, Brit, and For. Med. Rev. vol. xix. 309. 

** After the slaughter at Vionville, on the 18th of August (last), 
a strange and touching spectacle was presented. On the evening- 
call "being sounded by the first regiment of Dragoons of the Guard, 
six hundred and two riderless horses answered to the summons, 

— jaded, and in many cases maimed. The noble animals still re- 
tained their disciplined habits." — German Post, quoted by the 
Spectator. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 301 

glyphics, as the features are engraved with the traces of 
thought and passion. And, if this is so, must not the 
record, we ask, perish with the organ ? Alas ! how 
often do we see it perish before the organ ! — the 
mighty satirist tamed into oblivious imbecility ; the 
great scholar wandering without sense of time or place 
among his alcoves, taking his books one by one from 
the shelves, and fondly patting them; a child once 
more among his toys, but a child whose to-morrows 
come hungry, and not full-handed, — come as birds of 
prey in the place of the sweet singers of morning. 
We must all become as little children if we live lona: 
enough ; but how blank an existence the wrinkled in- 
fant must carry into the kingdom of heaven, if the 
Power that gave him memory does not repeat the 
miracle by restoring it ! 

The connection between thought and the structure 
and condition of the brain is evidently so close that 
all we have to do is to study it. It is not in this di- 
rection that materialism is to be feared : we do not find 
Hamlet and Faust, right and wrong, the valor of men 
and the purity of women, by testing for albumen, or 
examining fibres in microscopes. 

It is in the moral world that materialism has worked 
the strangest confusion. In various forms, under im- 
posing names and aspects, it has thrust itself into the 
moral relations, until one hardly knows where to look 
for any first principles without upsetting everything 
in searching for them. 

The moral imiverse includes nothing but the exer- 
cise of choice : all else is machinery. What we can 
help and what we cannot help are on two sides of a 
line which separates the sphere of human responsibil 



302 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ity from that of the Being who has arranged and con« 
trols the order of things. 

The question of the freedom of the will has been an 
open one, from the days of Milton's demons in con. 
clave to the recent most noteworthy essay of Mr. Haz^ 
ard, our Rhode Island neighbor." It still hangs sus- 
pended between the seemingly exhaustive strongest 
motive argument and certain residual convictions. The 
sense that we are, to a limited extent, seK-determining ; 
the sense of effort in willing ; the sense of responsibility 
in view of the future, and the verdict of conscience in 
review of the past, — all of these are open to the ac- 
cusation of fallacy ; but they all leave a certain undis- 
charged balance in most minds.* We can invoke the 
strong arm of the Deus ex macJiina^ as Mr. Hazard, 
and Kant and others, before him, have done. Our 
will may be a primary initiating cause or force, as 
unexplainable, as unreducible, as indecomposable, as 
impossible if you choose, but as real to our belief, as 
the ceternitas a parte ante. The divine foreknowledge 
is no more in the way of delegated choice than the di- 
vine omnipotence is in the way of delegated power. 
The Infinite can surely slip the cable of the finite if it 
choose so to do. 

" " Witness on him that any parfit clerk is, 
That in scole is gret altercation 
In this matere, and gret disputison, 
And hath ben, of an hundred thousand men ; 
But I ne cannot boult it to the bren." 

Chaucer, The Nonne's Preeste's Tale. 

* " But, sir, as to the doctrine of necessity, no man believes it. 

If a man should give me arguments that I do not see, though I 

could not answer them, should I believe that I do not see ? " — 

Boswell's Life of Johnson, vol. viii. p. 331. London, 1848. 

" What have you to do with liberty and necessity ? or what 
more than to hold your tongue about it ? " — Johnson to Bos- 
well. lUd. letter 396. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 303 

It is one thing to prove a proposition like the doc- 
trine of necessity in terms, and another thing to ac- 
cept it as an article of faith. There are cases in which 
I would oppose to the credo quia impossihile est a 
paradox as bold and as serviceable, — nego quia jyTO" 
hatum est. Even Mr. Huxley, who throws quite as 
much responsibility on protoplasm as it will bear, 
allows that " our volition counts for something as a 
condition of the course of events." 

I reject, therefore, the mechanical doctrine which 
makes me the slave of outside influences, whether it 
work with the logic of Edwards, or the averages of 
Buckle ; whether it come in the shape of the Greek's 
destiny, or the Mahometan's fatalism ; or in that other 
aspect, dear to the band of believers, whom Beesly of 
Everton, speaking in the character of John Wesley, 
characterized as 

" The crocodile crew that believe in election." " 

But I claim the right to eliminate all mechanical 
ideas which have crowded into the sphere of intelli- 
gent choice between right and wrong. The pound of 
flesh I will grant to Nemesis ; but, in the name of 
human nature, not one drop of blood, — not one drop. 

Moral chaos began with the idea of transmissible 
responsibility.* It seems the stalest of truisms to say 
that every moral act, depending as it does on choice, 

" Southey's Life of Wesley, vol. ii. note 28. 

* " II est sans doute qu'il n'y a rien qui choque plus notre 
raison que de dir eque le peche du premier homme ait rendu 
coupables ceux qui, etant si eloignes de cette source, semblent 
iacapables d'y participer. Get ecoulement ne nous parait pas 
seulement impossible, il nous semble meme tres injuste ; car qu'y- 
a-t-il de plus contraire au regies de notre miserable justice que 
de damner eternellement un enfant incapable de volpnte, pour un 



804 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

is in its nature exclusively personal ; that its penalty, 
if it have any, is payable, not to bearer, not to order, 
but only to the creditor himself. To treat a mal-voli- 
tion, which is inseparably involved with an internal 
condition, as capable of external transfer from one 
person to another, is simply to materialize it. When 
we can take the dimensions of virtue by triangulation ; 
when we can literally weigh Justice in her own scales ; 
when we can speak of the specific gravity of truth, or 
the square root of honesty ; when we can send a 
statesman his integrity in a package to Washington, 
if he happen to have left it behind, — then we may 
begin to speak of the moral character of inherited 
tendencies, which belong to the machinery for which 
the Sovereign Power alone is responsible. The mis- 
fortune of perverse instincts, which adhere to us as 
congenital inheritances, should go to our side of the 

peche ou H parait avoir si peu de part qu'il est commis six mille 
ans avant qu'il f ut en etre ? " — Pascal, Pensees, c. x. § 1. 

"Justice " and "mercy " often have a technical meaning when 
applied to the Supreme Being. Mr. J. S. Mill has expressed 
himself very freely as to the juggling with words. — Examina- 
tion of Sir. W. Hamilton's Philosophy, i. 131. 

The Romanists fear for the future welfare of babes that per- 
ish unborn ; and the extraordinary means which are taken to 
avert their impending " punishment " are well known. 

Thomas Shepard, our famous Cambridge minister, seems to 
have shared these apprehensions. See his Letter in Young's 
Chronicles of the Pilgrims of Massachusetts, p. 538. Boston, 1846. 

The author of " The Day of Doom " is forced by his logic to 
hand the infants over to the official tormentor, only assigning 
them the least uncomfortable of the torture-chambers. 

However these doctrines may be softened in the belief of many, 
the primary barbarism on which they rest — that is, the transfer 
of mechanical ideas mto the world of morals, with which they 
are in no sense homologous — is alnaost universally prevalent, and 
like to be at present. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. o05 

account, if the books of heaven are kept, as the great 
Church of Christendom maintains they are, by double 
entry. But the absurdity which has been held up to 
ridicule in the nursery has been enforced as the high- 
est reason upon older children. Did our forefathers 
tolerate ^sop among them ? "I cannot trouble the 
water where you are," says the lamb to the wolf ? 
" don't you see that I am farther down the stream ? '' 
— " But a year ago you called me ill names." — " Oh 
sir ! a year ago I was not born." — " Sirrah," replies 
the woK, "if it was not you, it was your father, and 
that is all one ; " and finishes with the usual practical 
application. 

If a created being has no rights which his Creator 
is bound to respect, there is an end to all moral rela- 
tions between them. Good Father Abraham thought 
he had, and did not hesitate to give his opinion. 
"Far be it from Thee," he says, to do so and so. 
And Pascal, whose reverence amounted to theopho- 
bia,** could treat of the duties of the Supreme to 
the dependent being.* If we suffer for anything ex- 
cept our own wrong-doing, to call it punishment is 
like speaking of a yard of veracity or a square inch of 
magnanimity. 

So to rate the gravity of a mal- volition by its con- 
sequences is the merest sensational materialism. A 
little child takes a prohibited friction-match : it kin- 

" I use tliis term to designate a state of mind thus described by 
Jeremy Taylor : " There are some persons so miserable and scru- 
pulous, such perpetual tormenters of themselves with unnecessary 
fears, that their meat and drink is a snare to their consciences. 
" These persons do not believe noble things of God." 
* " II y a un devoir reciproque entre Dieu et les hommes. . . . 
Quid debui f ' accusez moi,' dit Dieu dans Isaie. Dieu doit ac- 
complir ses promesses," etc. — Pensees, xxiii. 3. 



306 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

dies a conflagration with it, which burns down the 
house, and perishes itself in the flames. Mechanically, 
this child was an incendiary and a suicide ; morally, 
neither. Shall we hesitate to speak as charitably of 
multitudes of weak and ignorant grown-up children, 
moving about on a planet whose air is a deadly poison, 
which kills all that breathe it four or five scores of 
years ? 

Closely allied to this is the pretence that the liabili- 
ties incurred by any act of mal-volition are to be 
measured on the scale of the Infinite, and not on that 
of the total moral capacity of the finite agent, — a me- 
chanical application of the Oriental way of dealing 
with offences. The sheik or sultan chops a man's 
head off for a look he does not like : it is not the 
amount of wrong, but the importance of the personage 
who has been outraged. We have none of those moral 
relations with power, as such, which the habitual East- 
ern modes of speech seem to imply. 

The next movement in moral materialism is to estab- 
lish a kind of scale of equivalents between perverse 
moral choice and physical suffering. Pain often cures 
ignorance^ as we know, — as when a child learns not 
to handle fire by burning its fingers, — but it does not 
change the moral nature." Children may be whipped 
into obedience, but not into virtue ; and it is not pre- 
tended that the penal colony of heaven has sent back 
a single reformed criminal. We hang men for our 
convenience or safety ; sometimes shoot them for re- 
venge. Thus we come to associate the infliction of in- 
jury with offences as their satisfactory settlement, — 
a kind of neutralization of them, as of an acid with an 

" " No troubles will, of themselves, work a change in a wicked 
heart." — Matthew Henry, Com. on Luke, xxiii. 29. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MOKALS. 307 

alkali : so that we feel as if a jarring moral universe 
would be all right if only suffering enough were added 
to it. This scheme of chemical equivalents seems to 
me, I confess, a worse materialism than making pro- 
toplasm master of arts and doctor of divinity. 

Another mechanical notion is that which treats 
moral evil as bodily disease has so long been treated, 
— as being a distinct entity, a demon to be expelled, a 
load to be got rid of, instead of a condition, or the re- 
sult of a condition." But what is most singular in the 
case of moral disease is, that it has been forgotten 
that it is a living creature in which it occurs, and 
that all living creatures are the subjects of natural and 
sj)ontaneous healing processes. A broken vase cannot 
mend itself ; but a broken bone can. Nature, that is, 
the Divinity, in his every- day working methods, will 
soon make it as strong as ever. 

Suppose the beneficent self-healing process to have 
repaired the wound in the moral nature : is it never 
to become an honest scar, but always liable to be re- 
opened ? Is there no outlawry of an obsolete self-de- 
termination ? If the President of the Society for the 
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals impaled a fly on a 
pin when he was ten years old, is it to stand against 
him, crying for a stake through his body, in scecula 
sceculorum, ? * The most popular hymn of Protestant- 
ism, and the " Dies Irae " of Romanism, are based on 
this assumption : Nil inultum remanebit. So it is 

" " The strength of modern therapeutics lies in the clearer per- 
ception, than formerly, of the great truth, that diseases are hut 
perverted life-processes, and have for their natural history, not 
only a heginmng, but equally a period of culmination and de- 
cline." — Medicine in Modern Times. Dr. Gull's Address, p. 187. 

* There is no more significant evidence of natural moral evo- 



308 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

that a condition of a conscious being lias been mate- 
rialized into a purely inorganic brute fact, — not 
merely dehumanized, but deanimalized and devital- 
ized. 

Here it was that Swedenborg, whose whole secret I 
will not pretend to have fully opened, though I have 
tried with the key of a thinker whom I love and 
honor, — that Swedenborg, I say, seems to have come 
in, if not with a new revelation, at least infusing new 
life into the earlier ones. What we are will deter- 
mine the company we are to keep, and not the avoir- 
dupois weight of our moral exuviae, strapped on our 
shoulders like a porter's burden. 

Having once materialized the whole province of self- 
determination and its consequences, the next thing is, 
of course, to materialize the methods of avoiding these 
consequences. We are all, more or less, idolaters, and 
believers in quackery. We love specifics better than 
regimen, and observances better than self-government. 
The moment our belief divorces itseK from character, 
the mechanical element begins to gain upon it, and 
tends to its logical conclusion in the Japanese prayer- 
mill.« 

lution than the way in which children outgrow the cruelty which 
is so common in what we call their tender years. 

" As ruthless as a baby with a worm ; 
As cruel as a schoolboy ere he grows 
To pity, — more from ignorance than will." 

Tennyson, Walking to the Mail. 

** One can easily conceive the confusion which might be wrought 
in young minds by such teachmg as this of our excellent Thomas 
Shepard : — 

" The Paths to Hell be but two : the first is the Path of Sin, 
which is a dirty Way; Secondly, iihe Path of Duties, which 
(rested in) is but a cleaner Way." — Quoted by Israel Lormg, 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MOKALS. 309 

Brotliers of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, my slight 
task is finished. I have always regarded these occa- 
sions as giving an opportunity of furnishing hints for 
future study, rather than of exhibiting the detailed re- 
suits of thought. I cannot but hope that I have 
thrown some ray of suggestion, or brought out some 
clink of questionable soundness, which will justify me 
for appearing with the lantern and the hammer. 

The hardest and most painful task of the student 
of to-day is to occidentalize and modernize the Asiatic 
modes of thought which have come down to us closely 
wedded to mediaeval interpretations. We are called 
upon to assert the rights and dignity of our humanity, 
if it were only that our worship might be worthy the 
acceptance of a wise and magnanimous Sovereign. 
SeK-abasement is the proper sign of homage to supe- 
riors with the Oriental. The Occidental demands self- 
respect in his inferiors as a condition of accepting 
their tribute to him as of any value. The Icotou in all 
its forms, the pitiful acts of creeping^ crawling^ fawn- 
ing^ lihe a dog at Ms master's feet (which acts are 
signified by the word we translate worship^ according 
to the learned editor of " The Comprehensive Commen- 
t'ary")," are offensive, not gratifying to him. Does 
not the man of science who accepts with true manly 
reverence the facts of Nature, in the face of all his 
venerated traditions, offer a more acceptable service 
than he who repeats the formulae, and copies the ges- 

Pastor of the West Church in Sudbury, in A Practical Discourse, 
etc. Boston : Kneeland & Green, 1749. 

However sound the doctrme, it is sure to lead to the substitu- 
tion of some easy mechanical contrivance, — some rite, penance, or 
formula, — for perpetual and ever-renewed acts of moral self- 
deterniination. 

" See note on Matthew xi. 11. 



310 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

tures, derived from the language and customs o£ des- 
pots and their subjects ? The attitude of modern 
Science is erect, her aspect serene, her determination 
inexorable, her onward movement unflinching ; be- 
cause she believes herself, in the order of Providence, 
the true successor of the men of old who brought 
down the light of heaven to men. She has reclaimed 
astronomy and cosmogony, and is already laying a firm 
hand on anthropology, over which another battle must 
be fought, with the usual result, to come " sooner or 
later. Humility may be taken for granted as existing 
in every sane human being ; but it may be that it most 
truly manifests itself to-day in the readiness with which 
we bow to new truths as they come from the scholars, 
the teachers, to whom the inspiration of the Almighty 
giveth understanding. If a man should try to show 
it in the way good men did of old, — by covering him- 
self with tow-cloth, sitting on an ash-heap, and disfig- 
uring his person, — we should send him straightway 
to Worcester or Somerville ; and if he began to " rend 
his garments " it would suggest the need of a strait- 
jacket. 

Our rocky New England and old rocky Judaea al- 
ways seem to have a kind of yearning for each other : 
Jerusalem governs Massachusetts, and Massachusetts 
would like to colonize Jerusalem. 

" The pine-tree dreametla of the pahn, 
The palm-tree of the pine." 

But political freedom inevitably generates a new type 
of religious character, as the conclave that contem- 
plates endowing a dotard with infallibility has found 
out, we trust, before this time." The American of to- 

" We have since discovered that the dogma was a foregone con- 
clusion. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 311 

day may challenge for himself the noble frankness in 
his highest relations which did honor to the courage of 
the Father of the Faithful. 

And he may well ask, in view of the slavish beliefs 
which have governed so large a part of Christendom, 
whether it was an ascent or a descent from the Ro- 
man's 

Sifractus illahatur orhis 
Impavidum ferient ruince 
to the monk's 

Quid sum miser tunc facturus, 
Quern patronum rogaturus f 

Who can help asking such questions as he sits in 
the light of those blazing windows of the ritual renais- 
sance, burning with hectic colors like the leaves of 
the decaying forest before the wind has swept it bare, 
and listens to the delicious strains of the quartet as it 
carols forth its smiling devotions ? 

Our dwellings are built on the shell-heaps, the 
kitchen-middens of the age of stone. Inherited be- 
liefs, as obscure in their origin as the parentage of the 
cave-dwellers, are stronger with many minds than the 
evidence of the senses and the simplest deductions of 
the intelligence. Persons outside of Bedlam can talk 
of the " dreadful depravity of lunatics," — the suffer- 
ers whom we have learned to treat with the tenderest 
care, as the most to be pitied of all God's children.** 
Mr. Gosse can believe that a fossil skeleton, with the 
remains of food in its interior, was never part of a 
living creature, but was made just as we find it,^ — a 
kind of stage-property, a clever cheat, got up by the 
great Manager of the original Globe Theatre. All 

* Brit, and Foreign Med. Review for July, 1841 ; Wigan, op. cit. 

* Owen, in Encyc. Brit. Sth. edition, art. "Paleontology," p 
124, note. 



» 

312 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

we can say of such persons is, tliat their " illative 
sense," to use Dr. Newman's phrase, seems to most of 
us abnormal and unhealthy. We cannot help looking 
at them as affected with a kind of mental Daltonism. 

"Believing ignorance," said an old Scotch divine, 
" is much better than rash and presumptuous knowl- 
edge." ^ But which is most likely to be presumptuous, 
ignorance, or knowledge ? True faith and true philos- 
ophy ought to be one ; and those disputes, — a double 
verite, — those statements, " true according to philos- 
ophy, and false according to faith," condemned by the 
last Council of Lateran,^ ought not to find a place in 
the records of an age like our own. Yet so enlight- 
ened a philosopher as Faraday could say in a letter to 
one of his correspondents, " I claim an absolute dis- 
tinction between a religious and an ordinary belief. 
If I am reproached for weakness in refusing to apply 
those mental operations, which I think good in high 
things, to the very highest, I am content to bear the 
reproach." 

We must bestir ourselves ; for the new generation is 
upon us, — the marrow-bone-splitting descendants of 
the old cannibal troglodytes. Civilized as well as sav- 
age races live upon their parents and grandparents. 
Each generation strangles and devours its predecessor. 
The young Feejeean carries a cord in his girdle for his 
father's neck ; the young American, a string of prop- 
ositions or syllogisms in his brain to finish the same rel- 
ative. The old man says, " Son, I have swallowed 
and digested the wisdom of the past." The young 
man says, " Sire, I proceed to swallow and digest thee 
with all thou knowest." There never was a sand- 

" Buckle, Hist, of Civilization, ii. 327, note. 

* Leibnitz, Consid. sur la Doctrine d^un Esprit Universel. 



MECHANISM IN THOUGHT AND MORALS. 313 

glass, nor a clepsydra, nor a horologe, that counted 
the hours and dsijs and years with such terrible signifi- 
cance as this academic chronograph which has just 
completed a revolution. The prologue of life is fin- 
ished here at twenty : then come five acts of a decade 
each, and the play is over, with now and then a pleas- 
ant or a tedious afterpiece, when haK the lights are 
put out, and half the orchestra is gone. 

We have just seen a life finished whose whole com- 
pass was included within the remembered years of 
many among us. Why was our great prose-minstrel 
mourned by nations, and buried with kings ? Not 
merely because of that genius, prolific as Nature her- 
seK, we might almost say, in tjrpes of character, and 
aspects of life, whom, for this sufficient reason, we 
dare to name in connection with the great romancer of 
the North, and even with the supreme poet of man- 
kind, — was he not a kind of Shakespeare, working in 
terra-cotta instead of marble ? — but because he vin- 
dicated humanity, not against its Maker, but against 
itself ; because he took the part of his frail, erring, 
sorrowing, dying fellow-creature, against the demonol- 
ogists who had pretended to write the history of hu- 
man nature, with a voice that touched the heart as no 
other had done since the Scotch peasant was laid down 
to slumber in the soil his song had hallowed." 

We are not called to mourn over the frailties of the 

" Providence has arranged an admirable system of compensa- 
tions in the distribution of talents and instincts : so that, as in the 
rule of three, the product of the extremes of belief equals that 
of the middle terms; or, as in the astatic needles, the opposite 
polar forces are balanced against each other. In Scotland, the 
creed is the Westminster Confession, and the national poet is 
Burns. In England, Bunyan stands at one end of the sheK, and 
Dickens at the other. 



314 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

great story-teller, as we must sorrow in remembering 
those of tlie sweet singer of Scotland. But we all 
need forgiveness ; and there must be generous failings 
in every true manhood which it makes Heaven itself 
happier to pardon. " I am very human," Dickens 
said to me one of the last times I ever met him. And 
so I feel as if I might repeat, in tender remembrance 
of Charles Dickens, a few of the lines I wrote some 
years ago as my poor tribute to the memory of Robert 
Burns : — 

We praise him, not for gifts divine; 

His Muse was born of woman; 
His manhood breathes in every line: 

Was ever heart more human ? 

We love him, praise him, just for this, — 

In every form and feature, 
Through wealth and want, through woe and bliss. 

He saw his fellow-creature. 

Ay, Heaven had set one living man 

Beyond the pedant's tether: 
His virtues, frailties. He may scan 

Who weighs them all together ! 



IX. 

THE PHYSIOLOGY OF VERSIFICATION. 

HARMONIES OF ORGANIC AND ANIMAL LIFE. 

We are gqverned in our apparently voluntary ao 
tions by impulses derived from many obscure sources 
which act upon us almost without our cognizance. 
The digestive system legislates largely for our habits, 
bodily and mental, and its condition has no insignifi- 
cant effect upon our intellectual and spiritual states. 
We are commanded to a considerable extent by our 
idiosyncrasies and infirmities. The secret of our di- 
versities as social beings lies far more in our peptic 
capacities, in our indifference to exposure or liability 
to suffer from it, in our sensibility to cold and heat or 
to the air of ill-ventilated rooms, in the varying amount 
of sleep we require, in the degree of ability to bear 
strong light, in the quickness or dulness of our hear- 
ing, in the greater or less degree of fatigue induced 
by the standing posture, and in the demands of inter- 
nal organs which have a will if not a voice of their 
own, than our friends who call us good companions or 
otherwise are always ready to believe. 

There are two great vital movements preeminently 
distinguished by their rhythmical character, — the 
respiration and the pulse. These are the true time- 
keepers of the body; having a constant relation in 
health, the proportion being, as Mr. Hutchinson has 



316 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

shown, one inspiration to every four beats of the heart. 
It is very easy to prove that the first of these rhyth- 
mical actions has an intimate relation with the struc- 
ture of metrical compositions. That the form of 
verse is conditioned by economy of those muscular 
movements which insure the oxygenation of the blood 
is a fact which many have acted on the strength of 
without knowing why they did so. 

Let us look first at the natural rate of respira- 
tion. Of 1817 individuals who were the subject of 
Mr. Hutchinson's observations, " the great majority 
(1731) breathed from sixteen to twenty-four times 
per minute. Nearly a third breathed twenty times 
per minute, a number which may be taken as the 
average." " 

The " fatal facility " of the octosyllabic measure has 
often been spoken of, without any reference to its real 
cause. The reason why eight syllable verse is so sin- 
gularly easy to read aloud is that it follows more ex- 
actly than any other measure the natural rhythm of 
respiration. In reading aloud in the ordinary way 
from the " Lay of the Last Minstrel," from " In Me- 
moriam," or from " Hiawatha," all written in this 
measure, the first two in iambics, or short-longs, the 
last in trochaics or long-shorts, it will be found that 
not less than sixteen nor more than twenty-four lines 
will be spoken in a minute, probably about twenty. It 
is plain, therefore, that if one reads twenty lines in a 
minute, and naturally breathes the same number of 
times during that minute, he will pronounce one line 
to each expiration, taking advantage of the pause at 
its close for inspiration. The only effort required is 
that of vocalizing and articulating ; the breathing 
» Flint's Physiology, i. 391. 



THE PHYSIOLOGY OF VERSIFICATION. 317 

takes care of itself, not even demanding a tliought ex- 
cept where the sense may require a pause in the mid- 
dle of a line. The very fault found with these octo- 
syllabic lines is that they slip away too fluently, and 
run easily into a monotonous sing-song. 

In speaking the ten syllable or heroic line, that of 
Pope's Homer, it will be found that about fourteen 
lines wil] be pronounced in the minute. If a breath 
is allowed to each line the respiration will be longer 
and slower than natural, and a sense of effort and fa- 
tigue will soon be the consequence. It will be remem- 
bered, however, that the ccesura^ or pause in the 
course of the line, comes in at irregular intervals as a 
" breathing-place," which term is its definition when 
applied to music. This gives a degree of relief, but 
its management requires care in reading, and it en- 
tirely breaks up the natural rhythm of breathing. 

The fourteen syllable verse, that of Chapman's 
Homer, the common metre of our hymn-books, is 
broken in reading into alternate lines of eight and 
six syllables. This also is exceedingly easy reading, 
allowing a line to each expiration, and giving time for 
a little longer rest than usual at the close of the six 
syllable line. 

The twelve syllable line, that of Drayton's "Polyol- 
bion," is almost intolerable, from its essentially un- 
physiological construction. One can read the ten sylla- 
ble line in a single expiration without any considerable 
effort. One instinctively divides ^q fourteen syllable 
line so as to accommodate it to the respiratory rhythm. 
But the twelve syllable line is too much for one ex- 
piration and not enough for two. For this reason, 
doubtless, it has been instinctively avoided by ahnost 
all writers in every period of our literature. 



818 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

The long measure of Tennyson's " Maud " lias lines 
of a length varying from fourteen to seventeen sylla- 
bles, which are irregularly divided in reading for the 
respiratory pause. Where the sense does not require a 
break at some point of the line we divide it by accents, 
three in each half, no matter what the niunber of syl- 
lables ; but the breaks which the sense requires so in- 
terfere with the regularity of the breathing as to make 
these parts of "Maud" among the most difficult verses 
to read aloud, almost as difficult as the " Polyolbion." 

It may be said that the law of relation here pointed 
out does not apply to the writing of verse, however it 
may be with regard to reading or declaiming it. But 
the early poems of a people are recited or sung before 
they are committed to writing, and even if a versifier 
does not read aloud as he writes, he mentally articu- 
lates every line, and takes cognizance instinctively of 
its physiological adjustment to respiration as he does 
of its smoothness or roughness, which he hears only 
in imagination. 

The critical test of poetry by the stop-watch, and its 
classification according to its harmonizing more or 
less exactly with a great vital function, does not go 
very far, but it is quantitative and exactly scientific so 
far as it does go. The average reader will find on 
trial that the results given above are correct enough 
to justify the statements made. But here, as in as- 
tronomical observation, we must not forget the per- 
sonal equation. An individual of ample chest and 
quiet temperament may breathe habitually only four- 
teen times in a minute, and find the heroic, or iambic 
pentameter, — the verse of Pope's Homer and Gray's 
Elegy, — to correspond with his respiratory rhythm, 
and thus to be easier than any other for him to read. 



THE PHYSIOLOGY OF VERSIFICATION. 319 

A person of narrower frame and more nervous habit 
may breathe oftener than twenty times in a minute, 
and find the seven syllable verse of Dyer's " Grongar 
Hill "fits his respiration better than the octosyllables 
of Scott or Tennyson or Longfellow. A quick-breath- 
ing little child will learn to recite verses of two and 
four syllables, like the story of the couple whose pre- 
dilections in favor of azotized and non-azotized diet 
are recorded in our nursery classic, and do it easily, 
when it would have to catch its breath in the middle 
of lines of six or seven syllables. 

Nothing in poetry or in vocal music is widely popu- 
lar that is not calculated with strict reference to the 
respiratory function. All the early ballad poetry 
shows how instinctively the reciters accommodated 
their rhythm to their breathing. " Chevy Chace " or 
" The Babes in the Wood " may be taken as an ex- 
ample for verse. "God save the King," which has a 
compass of some half a dozen notes and takes one 
expiration, economically used, to each line, may be re- 
ferred to as the musical illustration. 

The unconscious adaptation of voluntary life to the 
organic rhythm is perhaps a more pervading fact than 
we have been in the habit of considering it. One can 
hardly doubt that Spenser breathed habitually more 
slowly than Prior, and that Anacreon had a quicker 
respiration than Homer. And this difference, which 
we conjecture from their rhythmical instincts, if our 
conjecture is true, probably, almost certainly, charac- 
terized all their vital movements. 

It seems not unlikely that other organic rh3rthms 
may be found more or less obscurely hinted at in the 
voluntary or animal functions. How far is accent 
suggested by or connected with the movement of the 



320 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

pulse, every stroke of which, if it does not lift the 
brain, as Bichat taught, sends a shock through its 
whole substance, and compresses it in its unyielding 
case ? It is worth noting that twenty acts of respira- 
tion mean eighty arterial pulsations, and that twenty 
octosyllabic lines corresponding to these eighty pulsa- 
tions have exactly eighty accents. Again, there is a 
singular coincidence between the average pulsations of 
the arteries and the number of steps taken in a min- 
ute ; and as we hurry our steps, the heart hurries to 
keep up with them. They sometimes correspond so 
nearly that one is reminded of the relation between 
the steam-chest, with its two alternately opening valves, 
and the piston with its corresponding movements, as 
we see it in the steam-engine. The doctrine of Bichat 
referred to above has been combated on the ground 
that the closely imprisoned brain could not be lifted; 
but the forcible impact of the four columns of arterial 
blood is none the less real in the normal condition 
than when the brain is seen to be raised through an 
accidental opening in the skull. So, also, notwith- 
standing the gradual equalization of the cardiac means 
impulse, this impulse must be felt very extensively 
throughout the body. We see that it can lift a limb 
through a considerable space when we happen to sit 
with one leg crossed over the other. It is by no means 
impossible that the regular contractions of the heart 
may have obscure relations with other rhythmical 
movements more or less exactly synchronous with their 
own ; that our accents and our gestures get their first 
impulse from the cardiac stroke which they repeat in 
visible or audible form. In these funeral marches 
which our hearts are beating, we may often keep step 
to the cardiac systole more nearly than our poet sus- 



THE PHYSIOLOGY OF VERSIFICATION. 321 

pected. But these are only suggestions to be consid- 
ered and tested ; the relations of verse to the respira- 
tory rhythm will be easily verified and extended by 
any who may care to take the trouble. 



X. 

CEIME AND AUTOMATISM. 

WITH A NOTICE OF M. PROSPER DESPINE's "PSYCHOLOGIE 
NATURELLE." 

The occurrence among us within the last few years 
of crimes of singular atrocity and wanton cruelty has 
called the attention of many thinking persons to the 
condition of mind under which such acts are commit- 
ted. A fellow-creature at whose deeds a whole com- 
munity shudders, while he himself, even after they 
have been brought home to him, looks upon them with 
entire indifference, must have a moral nature very un- 
like that of ordinary human beings. Nothing is more 
difficult than to study such a being fairly. Instinct, 
Law, and Theology have all taken up their positions 
with reference to him. 

Instinct urges the common mind to swift, certain, 
and extreme measures. As the serpent when he is 
trodden on strikes, as the man who is smitten returns 
the blow as if he were a machine of which the spring 
is suddenly released, so a popular gathering executes 
prompt vengeance on the doer of an atrocious deed, 
where law does not stand between him and the in- 
stinct of the multitude. If lynch-law knew enough to 
have a Latin motto for its symbol, it would be cito^ 
certe^ sceve. It listens to no argument, for it is very 
little more than a mere animal movement. One might 



CEIME AND AUTOMATISM. 323 

as well reason witli a she-bear from whora he had 
stolen her cubs, as with a border mob dragging a mur- 
derer to the nearest tree. " Why, what evil hath he 
done ? " was Pilate's very fair question to the roughs 
of Jerusalem. " Crucify him ! " was aU the answer 
he got. Instinct, whether we call its rulings natural 
justice or natural injustice, has its place, none the 
less, in settling the character and determining the 
punishment of crime. It rids society of a nuisance or 
subjects the offender to a cautionary discipline. It 
strengthens the abhorrence of crime in a community, 
and to some extent deters those who are ill-disposed 
from carrying out their inclinations. But it makes 
mistakes about persons, it gratifies dangerous passions 
in those who execute its mandates, and it has no grad- 
uated scale of punishment. A la lanterne is its short- 
est, most frequent, and very convenient formula. Civ- 
ilization may hide it more or less completely under 
statutes and moral and religious precepts, but it lies 
as a struggling force beneath their repressive weight, 
and every now and then betrays itself in the court- 
room and even in the sanctuary. 

Law is an implement of society which is intended 
for every-day work. It is a coarse tool and not a math- 
ematical instrument. It deals with the acts of crim- 
inals and their immediate motives. Its efforts to get 
behind these proximate causes are not very satisfac- 
tory to those who have made a special study of the 
mechanism of human actions. It arraigned men for- 
merly because the devil had prompted them to kill 
their fellow-man. Not being able to hang the devil, 
it followed the Hudibrastic method and swung off his 
victims as a substitute. It does indeed recognize com- 
plete mental alienation as an excuse of forbidden acts. 



324 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

and heat of passion as tlieir palliation. But while it 
accepts the chemist's analysis of the contents of a 
stomach, it cares very little for a psychologist's analy- 
sis of a criminal's mental and moral elements, unless 
this criminal can be shown to present the technical 
conditions of the state defined as insanity. Its scale of 
punishments is graduated in a rough way, but it has 
no fixed standard except the hanging point. Instinct, 
tradition, convenience, in various combinations and 
changing from age to age, settle the marks on the 
scale below this highest level, which itself is only con- 
ditionally fixed, and changes in different times and 
places, so that in some commimities crime never reaches 
it. Of relative justice law may know something ; of 
expediency it knows much; with absolute justice it 
does not concern itself. 

Theology^ as represented in the formulae of its coun- 
cils and synods, while nominally treating of divinity, 
has chiefly contemplated the divine character in its re- 
lations to man, and consequently, inverting its thought, 
has become little more than traditional anthropology. 
Deriving its warrant, or claiming to, from the supreme 
source of law, it has transferred the whole subject of 
moral transgression from the region of the natural to 
that of the supernatural. It lent the devil to the law- 
yers to help out their indictments. It comes with its 
accepted axioms about human nature to confound the 
studies of the philosopher. Measuring the finite by 
an infinite standard, it abolishes all terms of compari- 
son. Testing all humanity in the scholastic vacuum 
left by pumping out the whole moral atmosjDhere, it 
sees two souls, one freighted with the burden of four- 
score guilty years, the other chargeable only with the 
lightest petulance of pulpy infancy, drop with the 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 325 

same swiftness into the abyss of boundless and end- 
less retribution, just as the feather and the guinea 
fall side by side in an exhausted bell glass and reach 
the bottom at the same moment. Accepting the me- 
chanical idea of transferable moral responsibility, it 
violates the plain law of homology, which declares 
that like must be compared with like, that virtue con- 
not be meted out with a yard-stick, that courage can- 
not be measured in a pint pot (though sometimes 
found in it), that a right or wrong act cannot be 
weighed in a grocer's balance. Theological specula- 
tion has thus climbed out of sight of the facts of hu- 
man nature, to find itself 

" Pinnacled dLm in tlie intense inane," 

and the anthropologist of to-day must request it to 
stand aside, as the geologist of yesterday has done 
with the old cosmogonies. 

In the face of all these obstacles, the subject of 
crime and the character of the criminal must be 
studied calmly, exhaustively, and independently of all 
inherited prejudices. The idols of the market, of the 
bench, and of the pulpit must be treated as so many 
stocks and stones by the naturalist who comes to the 
study of man as Huber gave himself to the study of 
bees, or Agassiz to that of tortoises. Savage instincts, 
barbarous usages, ancient beliefs, will all find them- 
selves confronted with a new order of facts which has 
not been studied, and with new interpretations of facts 
which have never been hazarded. 

Every novel growth of ideas has to encounter the 
weight of vested opinions and mortgaged prejudices. 
It has to face a society more or less unprepared for 
it I the Chinese with their fixed customs, the North 



326 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

American Indians with their feral natures, are not in 
a condition to listen to the last revelations of that 
multiple Messiah, modern civilization, as it speaks 
through its anointed races. The Pi-Utes and the 
Kickapoos of the wilderness are hard to reason with. 
But there is another tribe of irreclaimables, living in 
much larger wigwams and having all the look of civil- 
ized people, which is quite as intractable to the teach- 
ings of a new philosophy that upsets their ancestral 
totems. This is the tribe of the Pooh-Poohs, so called 
from the leading expression of their vocabulary, which 
furnishes them a short and easy method of disposing 
of all novel doctrines, discoveries and inventions of a 
character to interfere with their preconceived notions. 
They may possibly serve a useful purpose, like other 
barbarous and semi-barbarous human beings, by help- 
ing to keep down the too prolific family of noxious or 
troublesome animals, — the thinking, or rather talk- 
ing and writing ones. Beyond this they are of small 
value ; and they are always retreating before the ad- 
vance of knowledge, facing it, and moving backwards, 
still opposing the leaders and the front rank with their 
inextinguishable war-cry, Pooh-Pooh ! But the most 
obstinate of them all can scarcely fail to recognize 
that the issues of to-day really turn on points which 
within easy remembrance would hardly have been con- 
sidered open to discussion except in proscribed circles. 
In place of the question of the Deity's foreknowl- 
edge as limiting human freedom, we have under discus- 
sion the statistician's tables showing that the seeming 
contingencies of what we call voluntary action are so 
much matters of certainty that they can be confidently 
predicted. So many persons, of such and such ages 
and sexes, will, within a given district and within a 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 327 

given time, commit suicide by sucli and such methods, 
distributed according to their age and sex. So many 
children will die within the same district and period 
from drinking hot water out of the spouts of tea- 
kettles. In other words, will, like weather, obeys def- 
inite laws. The wind, be it not irreverently spoken, 
by no means literally bloweth where it listeth, but 
where it must, as certain precedent conditions have 
settled the question for it, and we know every morn- 
ing whence it cometh and whither it goeth. No priest 
or soothsayer that ever lived could hold his own 
against Old Probabilities. The will, like the wind, is 
anything but free ; it is so largely governed by or- 
ganic conditions and surrounding circumstances that 
we calculate upon it as on sunrise, and all the provi- 
sions are made for its anticipated decisions, as those 
minute habiliments, mysterious and manifold, are got 
ready beforehand for an expected little stranger. 

In place of the doctrine of predestination, in virtue 
of which certain individuals were to become or remain 
subjects of wrath, we are discussing organic tendencies, 
inborn idiosyncrasies, which, so far as they go, are 
purely mechanical, and are the best excuse that can be 
pleaded for a human being, exempting him from all 
moral responsibility when they reach a certain extreme 
degree, and exculpating him just so far as they are un- 
controllable, or unenlightened by any moral sense. 

We hear comparatively little of that " original sin " 
which made man ex officio a culprit and a rebel, and 
liable to punishment as such. But we have whole 
volumes on hereditary instincts of all kinds, sometimes 
in the direction of the worst crimes, and the more of 
this kind of original sin we find in a man, the more we 
are disposed to excuse his evil deeds. 



328 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

While our catecliisms are still charging man with 
the responsibility of "evil," including suffering and 
death, our text-books are inferring from the material 
record of the earth's strata that it existed in the form 
of violence, disease, and destruction of life, long be- 
fore man or beings like man existed on our planet. 

In place of following or combating the theorists 
who consider this world as an intermediate peniten- 
tiary adjusted for the discipline of souls that have 
sinned in a previous state (E. Beecher), or who main- 
tain that it was contrived beforehand to accord in its 
discords with " the miracle of sin " (Bushnell), we have 
to fight for or against the iconoclastic doctrines of the 
evolutionists. 

In place of considering man as a creature so utterly 
perverted from birth that the poles of his nature must 
be reversed, the tendency is to look upon him rather 
as subject to attractions and repulsions which are to 
be taken advantage of in education. As he does not 
give himself these attractions and repulsions, but re- 
ceives them through natural parentage, nor educate 
himself, but lies at the mercy of his conditions, the 
tendency is, again, to limit the range of his moral re- 
sponsibilities. 

In place of debating upon the forfeits of criminals 
to society, philosophers and philanthropists are chiefly 
occupying themselves with the duties of society to crim- 
inals. 

At the bottom of all the more prevalent thought of 
the time is the conviction that there is not enough in 
the history of humanity to account for the suffering 
which we are forced to witness, and that the hardest 
task of those who think and feel is that which Milton 
set himself — 

" To justify the ways of God to man." 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 329 

All these newer modes of thought are to a large 
extent outgrowths of what we may call physiological 
psychology. The foundations of this were laid in 
those studies of individual character made by the 
phrenologists, much in the same way that the founda- 
tions of chemistry were laid by the alchemists. In the 
pursuit of an unattainable end, and in the midst of 
great hallucinations, they made those observations and 
discoveries which, divorced from their fancies and the- 
ories, lent themselves to the building up of a true 
science. 

But the development of the connection of motive 
and determination has been, in the main, an expansion 
of the doctrine of reflex action. This doctrine, which 
started from the fact of the twitching of a decapitated 
frog's hind legs, has grown to such dimensions that 
it claims to solve some of the gravest questions in 
psychology, and to deal, in the face of the great en- 
dowed and incorporated beliefs, with the most serious 
problems of responsibility and retribution. 

Following the idea of Descartes, who considered all 
the lower animals as only living machines, and man 
himself as a machine with a superadded spiritual es- 
sence, we may glance a moment at the movements of 
the human mechanism. Circulation, secretion, and 
nutrition go on in health without our consent or knowl- 
edge. The heart's action is felt occasionally, but can- 
not be controlled by a direct act of the will. The res- 
piration is often perceived and partially under the 
influence of the will, but for the most part unnoticed 
and involuntary. Passing to what we call the volun- 
tary movements, we find that even when they obey our 
wishes the special actions which conspire to produce 
the effect wished for are neither ordered nor taken dis- 



330 PAGES FKOM AN^ OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

tinct cognizance of. Nothing shows this more clearly 
than the voice. Its tones and character, varying with 
the state of mind and feeling, are regulated by the 
nicest adjustments of a system of delicate antagoniz- 
ing muscles, the very existence of which would never 
be suspected but for the researches of the anatomist. 
Sudden and sharp sensations produce involuntary 
movements of voluntary muscles. By a similar me- 
chanical connection different impressions produce their 
corresponding emotions and ideas. These again pro- 
duce other ideas and emotions by a mechanism over 
which we have only a partial control. We cannot al- 
ways command the feelings of disgust, pity, anger, con- 
tempt, excited in us by certain presentations to our 
consciousness. We cannot always arrest or change 
the train of thoughts which is keeping us awake, how- 
ever much we may long to do so. Now the observa- 
tion of certain exceptional natures tends to show that 
a very large portion of their apparent self-determina- 
tions or voluntary actions, such as we consider that we 
should hold ourselves responsible for, are in reality 
nothing more nor less than reflex movements, auto- 
matic consequences of practically irresistible causes ex- 
isting in the inherited organization and in preceding 
conditions. 

It is to a comparatively recent work, which treats 
of these subjects from a new point of view, namely, the 
study of the mental and moral conditions of individual 
criminals, that the reader's attention is now called. 
The slight analysis will itself furnish the text of a 
running comment. It will not, of course, be inferred 
that the critic always agrees with or is responsible for 
the author's statements or opinions. Neither should 
the reader suppose that all the facts or opinions cited 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 331 

from the work are entirely original in the author. 
Many things, on the contrary, in this, as in every such 
work, are commonplaces to all who have studied its 
subject. 

In the year 1868, M. Prosper Despine, Doctor of 
Medicine, gave to the public three large volumes in 
which the psychology or mental mechanism of crime 
is studied from nature. The first volume expounds his 
general doctrine as to the motives of human action, 
and the degree to which they are ordered by the will 
or simply automatic. The second volume begins with 
the consideration of mental alienation and imbecility, 
and passes to the description and illustration of moral 
insanity and idiocy as seen in criminals. Then follow 
clinical observations, as they may be called, upon par- 
ricides and homicides. The third volume studies the 
mental and moral conditions of infanticides, suicides, 
incendiaries, robbers, and others belonging to the crim- 
inal class. This quasi-medical study of criminals is 
followed by an attempt to lay down the proper moral 
treatment to which they should be submitted. 

M. Despine's own abstract, or his analytical head- 
ings of his chapters, would exceed the limits of this 
article. It will be expedient, instead of following 
these, to give a more general view of the drift and 
method of the book. 

And first, though the author alludes to the difficulty 
with which new doctrines get a hearing, though he 
evokes the injured and somewhat weary ghosts of Co- 
pernicus and Galileo, he begins with an expression of 
reverential feeling. Science represents the thought of 
God discovered by man. By learning the natural laws 
he attaches effects to their first cause, the will of the 
Creator. 



832 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

M. Despine had been struck with the absence of 
emotion (sang froid?) which appears as so frequent a 
trait in criminals. This set him to studying their psy- 
chological history, and for that purpose he ransacked 
the " Gazette des Tribunaux " from the year 1825 
untU the time of writing, to study the cases there re- 
corded, exactly as a physician studies a similar record 
of bodily diseases. Out of this clinical study came 
his ideas about crime and criminals, and working his 
way backwards into general psychology he arrived at 
the conclusions which he has unfolded in his first vol- 
ume. 

The instincts, or natural desires, are the great 
springs of human action. The perfection of man 
consists in the perfection of the instinctive faculties, 
and these again are determined by the organization of 
the brain, their instrument. Studying the races of 
mankind in succession, the author finds in each inher- 
ent and characteristic differences, which belong to it 
as much as its stature, color, and other outward char- 
acteristics. So in individuals, and in their different 
conditions relative to sex, age, state of health or dis- 
ease, and other variable circumstances, he finds a wide 
range of diversities. A man who had always been 
amiable and affectionate became exceedingly irritable 
and quarrelsome after an attack of small-pox, and re- 
tained this character fourteen years later, when he was 
the subject of the observation. A profligate men- 
tioned by Plutarch had a fall and struck his head, 
after which accident he became a most virtuous cit- 
izen. 

In studying the criminal we wish to know how far 
he is such in virtue of his own free act. As the doc- 
trine which M. DesjDine teaches might be misinter- 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 333 

preted to mean more than he intends, his own state- 
ment of his position may be here introduced : " Al- 
though I have demonstrated the very small part taken 
by free-will in the performance of human actions, 1 
have not hesitated to proclaim still more emphatically 
that no one has more fully recognized and proved the 
existence of this power than myself." M. Despine 
cannot therefore be reproached with either atheism or 
fatalism. 

His test of free-will, or self-determination, is the 
sense of effort by which a desire is overcome, and the 
self-approval or self-reproach which follows a right or 
wrong action. But desire is only overcome by the 
sense of duty. Where this does not intervene there 
is nothing to hinder the strongest desire from having 
its own way ; there is no occasion for effort. Under 
these circumstances the man is as much a machine as 
the new-born babe, which has no choice, but simply 
obeys the impulse of its desires. There is no struggle 
between desire and the sense of duty before the com- 
mission of a crime, and no remorse after it, in persons 
destitute of the moral instinct. 

Nothing, then, is in the way of the selfish motive 
which leads to crime except some stronger selfish mo- 
tive, as fear, for instance. Crime will be like our 
ordinary every-day acts, without moral character and 
without moral responsibility. A careful study of 
criminals shows that in a large proportion of cases 
they are devoid of the ordinary moral instincts ; that 
they have no struggle beforehand except of purely 
selfish principles, that they have no true remorse for 
their guilt, and that their apparent repentance is noth- 
ing but fear of the future suffering with which they 
are threatened. These offenders against the laws of 



334 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

society are moral idiots ; their " crime " is not sl sin 
any more than eating or drinking or the satisfaction of 
any other natural desire. Our impressions about their 
mental conditions are mostly mere reflections of what 
we think would be our own feelings. Contrast the 
two following extracts, the first from Burton's " Anat- 
omy of Melancholy," the second from M. Despine. 

" Peter in his bonds slept secure, for he knew God 
protected him, and Tully makes it an argument of 
Hoscius Amerinus' innocency that he killed not his 
father, because he so securely slept." 

" How far from the reality presented by facts to the 
idea which moralists and poets have formed of the 
criminal ! ' The tiger tears his prey and sleeps ; man 
becomes a homicide and is sleepless,' says Chateau- 
briand, taking for granted an impossibility, namely, 
that the criminal is endowed with the sentiments which 
make man a moral being. But the observer who 
studies the facts relating to the sleep of criminals has 
an opinion directly opposite to that of the poet. ' Noth- 
ing more nearly resembles the sleep of the just than 
the sleep of the assassin,' said, in 1867, Maitre Guerin, 
the courrieriste of the " Monde lUustr^," speaking of 
an individual who, after committing a horrible, pre- 
meditated murder, lay down tranquilly and slumbered 
soundly." 

" I slept sound till three o'clock, awaked and writ 
these lines : — 

" Come, pleasing rest, eternal slumber fall. 
Seal mine, that once must seal the eyes of all; 
Calm and composed my soul her journey takes, 
No guilt that troubles, and no heart that aches " — 

Thus wrote Eugene Aram on the night before he was 
banged. 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 335 

The moral sense may be paralyzed for tlie moment, 
and its voice silenced by passion. In this condition a 
man may do a great wrong, use the most unmeasured 
language, or commit the most violent acts, without 
any thought of their evil nature. He is completely 
blinded, and his conduct is involuntary, because it is 
not combated by his moral sense. There is no strug- 
gle in the consciousness, and without this struggle 
there is, the author maintains, no proper exercise of 
free-will. When a man in a certain extremity of pas- 
sion strikes another, M. Despine would recognize no 
more self-determining agency in what he does than he 
would in the involuntary movement by which one 
withdraws his hand from the accidental contact with a 
heated iron. 

M. Despine's doctrine as to the passions is a reas- 
sertion and a philosophical expansion of the epigram- 
matic saying of Horace, Ira furor hrevis est : Anger 
— more generally, passion — is an insanity of short 
duration. 

A man, the author says, ought to bear everything 
rather than do wrong. But it is not in a man's power, 
he adds, to bear everything ; some things are too much 
for the forces with which nature has endowed him. 
We must, if we would not be unjust and cruel, allow 
for the existence of special moral impossibilities, 
which differ greatly in different individuals in virtue of 
the instinctive impulses peculiar to each. The exist- 
ence of such moral impossibilities can only be denied 
by persons whose nature is such that they can know 
nothing of them by their own experience. 

To recapitulate his leading ideas in his own lan- 
guage : " The sense of duty being a necessary condi- 
tion for the exercise of free-will, it becomes evident 



836 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE, 

that one who does not possess the moral sense, or who 
has lost it for the moment in a state of passion, is de- 
prived of free-will, of moral liberty, and is not morally 
responsible for his wrong-doings : if he commits any 
evil deeds, it is because the desire which prompts him 
to commit them is stronger than the innocent selfish 
desires which would lead him in another direction, and 
where selfish desires alone exist, whatever may be 
their character, as they are not matters of choice, the 
strongest always prevail over the weaker ones, by the 
action of a natural law." 

In short it is evident that the author substitutes 
mental automatic action for exercise of the will in the 
very cases commonly thought to involve the largest 
amount of responsibility, as implying the greatest 
amount of guilty volition. Instinct with its horror of 
cold-blooded, remorseless acts of cruelty. Law with 
its penalties roughly graduated in the ratio of the in- 
veterate malignity of the outrage, Theology with its 
deadly sins in distinction from venial offences, are all 
squarely met with the statement, professedly derived 
from a careful study of the facts as shown in the his- 
tory of criminals, that the most frightful crimes, com- 
mitted without a sign of compunction, and leaving not 
a shadow of regret, are without any moral character 
whatever ; from which it follows that the unfortunate 
subject of moral idiocy is just as innocently acting out 
the tendencies he inherits as the rattlesnake, which we 
hate by instinct, which we extirpate through legisla- 
tion if necessary, which we take as a type of evil in 
our theologies, but which is just as much a poor, de- 
pendent, not ill-meaning citizen of the universe, as the 
lamb and the dove, which are our most sacred sym- 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 337 

There is notliiiig absolutely new in this doctrine. 
Reid compared the condition of the man destitute of 
that inner light which gives the sense of right and 
wrong to that of the blind man with reference to col- 
ors. When Dr. Reid wrote, " Daltonism " had not 
been described. It was not generally known that 
many men are from their birth unable to distinguish 
between certain colors, green and red for instance. 
So, too, when he wrote, the condition corresponding 
to the term "moral insanity" was not distinctly rec- 
ognized. Careful observation has revealed the fre- 
quent existence of Daltonism, and M. Despine's book 
is mainly a collection of observations and studies to 
show that moral Daltonism, or partial mental blind- 
ness, though Instinct, Law, and Theology have gener- 
ally overlooked it, is of frequent occurrence. " Blood 
reddens the pavement, — that 's all," said a would-be 
murderer who had just missed killing his man and 
regretted his failure. " Cut my head off or send me 
to the galleys, I don't care which ; but I 'm sorry I 
did n't kill him." To the lamp-post, shouts lynch-law; 
Full term of imprisonment, pronounces the Chief Jus- 
tice ; Bound for perdition, exclaims the Priest. A 
moral idiot, says M. Despine ; take him up tenderly 
(to the constable) ; treat him gently, for he is an un- 
fortunate brother entitled to a double share of pity 
as suffering under the gravest of inherited calamities. 

This congenital want of moral sense shows itself 
very early. M. Despine quotes largely from a writer 
in the " Gazette des Hopitaux " on Children as Sub- 
jects of the Law. He recognizes a large class of chil- 
dren characterized by their physical development, to 
whom education seems of no use, and on whom the or- 
dinary motives to good action are thrown away. These 



338 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

children constitute tlie infant scliool of crime, for out 
of this class come the great majority of adult crim- 
inals. 

We need not follow M. Despine through the more 
or less detailed histories of crime and criminals. Such 
accounts are commonly sought for by readers fond of 
lively sensations, and there is enough of the exciting 
element to afford this vulgar interest. But while it is 
impossible to read about the famous criminals here 
mentioned without recognizing a certain melodramatic 
fascination in their stories, these are not told with any 
such aim, but always to get at the mechanism of crime, 
the mental and moral conditions, so different from 
those of the student who is trying to analyze them, 
under which the criminals acted. 

A few of the more obvious predisposing causes of 
moral insensibility may be briefly referred to. Many 
criminals come from families in which insanity pre- 
vails, in some of its common forms, and in many of 
them it either exists at the time the act considered 
as a crime was committed, or declares itself afterwards. 
— In the collection of casts at the Medical College in 
Boston is one taken from the face of a toothless old 
creature who died insane at La Salpetriere, — the old 
woman's hospital of Paris. These were once the fea- 
tures of the famous Theroigne de Mericourt, " La belle 
Liegoise," the beautiful fury who headed the Parisian 
mob which brought back the royal family from Ver- 
sailles to Paris. It is probable that in cases like this 
a less degree of the mental perversion, which after- 
wards became recognized as insanity, already existed 
while the subject of it was noted only for violence or 
eccentricity of conduct. 

Age is a notable factor in the production of moral 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 339 

olbliquities. Thus incendiarism is a specialty of young 
persons between the ages of ten and twenty-five years. 
There is no large community which cannot furnish ex- 
amples of young children who had an irresistible ten- 
dency to set fire to anything that would make a good 
blaze. Of this state of mind M. Despine says : " The 
neuropathic tendency which produces the incendiary 
passion not infrequently gives rise to hallucinations, 
and these have commonly a relation to the prevailing 
passion. Thus the person hears voices that cry to him, 
Burn ! Burn ! " There can be little doubt that similar 
" neuropathic " conditions account for other obliqui- 
ties of conduct chiefly observed in children and ado- 
lescents. 

Sex shows itself in the extraordinary moral perver- 
sions of hysteria. In a case adjudged at Berne, in 
1864, a married woman accused herself falsely, under 
the influence of hallucination, of lying and theft, of 
infidelity to her marriage vows, and called herself the 
assassin of her husband. 

Intoxication suspends the influence of the will, and 
turns the subject of it into an automaton not prop- 
erly responsible for his actions, excepting when he 
drinks to fit himself for the execution of a criminal 
purpose. M. Despine gives a lamentable picture of 
the habits of many of his countrymen. The abuse of 
alcohol is a scourge growing worse all the time. In the 
army, according to General Trochu's report, the old sol- 
diers have by no means the value generally attributed 
to them, on account of the great prevalence of drinking 
habits among them. Ahsinthe comes in for its denun- 
ciation. For the last ten years, says a writer whom 
M. Despine quotes, this strange drink has been sought 
after with the same passion that opium is in China. 



340 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

" If during the warm season one will walk along tlie 
boulevards between the hours of four and six in the aft- 
ernoon, he will be surprised to see what an incalcula- 
ble number of glasses of absinthe are set out on those 
little tables which are allowed to obstruct the sidewalk. 
What multitudes are to be found in this rash assem- 
bly ! At this hour Paris is poisoning itself I " Drunk- 
enness is a desperate disease, to be cured by prohibi- 
tory measures of all sorts. " Qui a bu, boira." The 
patient must be restrained, as he has lost the power of 
self-command. The most radical measures are recom- 
mended to prevent the production of alcoholic drinks. 
M. Despine would even limit the cultivation of the 
vine by law. 

The author makes small account of the religious pro- 
fessions so common in convicted criminals. They are 
found for the most part to be dictated by fear of the 
future, and not by remorse for the crime committed. 
Strange instances are given of the manner in which 
crime sometimes goes hand in hand with devotion. In 
1858 one Parang was condemned to death for robbing 
and murdering an old lady. His wife said, " This hap- 
pened the other day, and while he was at the old wom- 
an's, I was praying to God that he might succeed in 
his enterprise." A member of a band of assassins and 
robbers was in the habit, as a witness stated, of going 
down on his knees in church, and praying, like an 
Italian brigand, after a robbery or other misdeed. 

Those who remember the " chourineur " in Eugene 
Sue's " Mysteries of Paris," may find in the pages of 
the work before us portraits of criminals with fiercer 
instincts and far more malignant natures than those of 
the stabber of that famous story. Jarvot, who had 
murdered a couple of old people, said that after he 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 341 

had killed the wife he was no longer master of him- 
self ; " the devil pushed me on ; if there had been a 
dozen of them, a dozen I should have killed ; I did 
not know any longer what I was about." Here is the 
story of the too famous Lacenaire, a criminal with 
thirty different charges against him, — forgeries, rob- 
beries, assassinations ; here is the frightful record of 
Dumollard, "I'assassin des servantes," who kept a 
private cemetery for his victims, as we were told in 
our newspapers of the time, on his own premises ; 
sixteen young women were known to have been mur- 
dered by him ; here is a long account of the exami- 
nation of Charles Lemaire, a pale-faced, blond-haired 
young cut-throat, nineteen years old, whose regrets 
after a bloody deed were only that he had not killed 
three other persons, of whom his father was one. A 
very brief extract from the trial will repay the reading, 
shocking as it is to common humanity. It fixes for us 
the zero of moral sensibility, and incidentally gives us 
a glimpse of how they manage an examination in 
France, which, whether better or not, is very different 
from the English and American way. 

The President, After your mother's death your fa- 
ther said to you, " You are now the only object of my 
affections. I will work for you as I worked for your 
mother." Such language must have made a strong 
impression on you? 

The Prisoner. Not the slightest. 

Hie President. You have not been willing to 
work? 

The Prisoner. As much as at any time ; yes, I 
have always been a lazy fellow. 

The President. But this thing is odious that you 
are saying ! 



342 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

The Prisoner. I know that very well ; I understand 
perfectly that if all the world was like me, it could 
never go on. 

The President. So you understand that everybody 
else must work, and you do not choose to do any- 
thing ? 

The Prisoner. To work, one must make an exer- 
tion, and that I will not do. 

The President. Your father was afraid you would 
poison him? 

The Prisoner. He was wrong about that. I had 
thought of doing it, to be sure ; I had even spoken of 
it to him ; it was not the will that was wanting, but I 
am not much of an expert at that business. 

The President. And your only regret is that you 
did not kill three persons in place of one ? 

The Prisoner. Four. 

The President. You did not stop at the thought 
of parricide, then ? 

The Prisoner. On the contrary, I was happy in 
the idea of vengeance ; I will hold to that to the last. 

The President. So you keep to the same senti- 
ments. 

The Prisoner. Always ; they will never change. 
If I had spared my father, I should have left out the 
principal part of the performance. 

This youth, of not unprepossessing aspect, kept up 
his character from the first moment when he stood 
twirling his moustache at the bar, to the last hour, 
when he wanted his locks smoothed down, his forehead 
well shown, and his back hair parted before going to 
execution ; and he stretched his neck out for the axe as 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 343 

calmly as if lie had been John the Baptist. — The mob 
stones such a wretch, or tears him in pieces, or strings 
him up to the next bough ; the court has the gallows 
or the block ready for such a criminal; the priest 
points to the fiery oubliette^ where God forgets his 
creatures, ready - heated for .such a sinner ; the phi- 
losopher sees in such an unfortunate a malformed hu- 
man being. These monsters of crime, he will tell you, 
do not come into the world by accident ; they are the 
product of antecedent conditions. There is just as 
certainly something wrong in their nervous centres, — 
wrong proportion of parts, insufficiency here, excess 
there ; some faulty or even diseased state, — as there 
is a disarrangement in the electric telegraph apparatus 
when it does not work well under the ordinary sur- 
rounding conditions. In most cases crime can be 
shown to run in the blood, as M. Despine proves by 
different examples. — An instance illustrating this 
fact was recently reported by Dr. Harris of New 
York, and is briefly mentioned in the " Boston Medical 
and SurgicalJournal " for January 28, 1875. Finding 
crime and poverty out of proportion prevalent in a 
certain county on the upper Hudson, he looked up the 
genealogy of the families whose names were oftenest 
on the criminal records. He found that a young girl 
called Margaret was left adrift a great many years ago 
in a village of the county. Nine hundred descend- 
ants can be traced to this girl, including six genera- 
tions. Two hundred of these are recorded as criminals, 
and a large number of the others, idiots, imbeciles, 
drunkards, and of otherwise degraded character. If 
genius and talent are inherited, as Mr. Galton has so 
conclusively shown ; if honesty and virtue are heir- 
looms in certain families ,• if Falstaff could make King 



344 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF Lli'E. 

Henry know his son by a villainous trick of the eye 
and a foolish hanging of the nether lip, — and who 
that has seen two or three generations has not ob- 
served a thousand transmitted traits, villainous or 
other, in those all around him ? — why should not 
deep-rooted moral defects and obliquities show them- 
selves, as well as other qualities, in the descendants of 
moral monsters ? Shall there be whole families with 
supernumerary fingers, families of "bleeders," families 
with deep-dimpled chins, with single strands of prema- 
turely white hair, and other trivial peculiarities, and 
shall there not be families in which it is the fatal in- 
stinct of the child, almost as soon as it can distinguish 
right and wrong, to say, " Evil, be thou my good ? " 
We have a right to thank God, with the Pharisee, that 
we are not as some other men, but we must not torget 
to ask with the Apostle, " Who maketh thee to differ 
from another ? " We cannot add one cubit to our 
stature, and there is no more reason for believing that 
a person born without any moral sense can acquire it, 
than there is that a person born stone-deaf can become 
a musician. Its apparent absence does not prove, 
however, that it does not exist in some rudimentary 
form, and in such cases it may be developed to a cer- 
tain extent, like other imperfect faculties. 

It is plain enough from M. Despine's doctrines as 
to the mechanism of crime, especially in the worst 
cases, that he would substitute a moral hospital for a 
place of punishment. Moral idiocy is the greatest 
calamity a man can inherit, and the subjects of it de- 
serve our deepest pity and greatest care. 

A slight sketch of the programme laid down in the 
work before us for the treatment of criminals is all 
that can be here given. Its author does not consider 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 345 

himself at all as an idealist, working in a sphere of 
Utopian impossibilities. He would only extend to 
adults the methods which have been successfully ap- 
plied on the large scale to young persons in various 
reform schools, especially in that of Mettray in France, 
the course pursued in which and the admirable results 
it has produced are detailed at some length. Miss 
Carpenter, to whom he refers, holds the same belief as 
M. Despine, considering adult criminals as only larger 
children whose regeneration society must attempt by 
means similar to those used with the latter. Criminals 
must be " moralized," to give an English termination 
to M. Despine's French word. 

Of course, then, hanging is not the best use to which 
the criminal can be put. The author argues against 
capital punishment on the ground that it is unjust as 
applied to moral idiots, immoral considered as revenge, 
useless as a means of intimidation, and dangerous to 
society by cheapening the value of life. 

The convict prisons of France (hagnes') are, to bor- 
row the energetic language of Dr. Bertrand, " laza- 
rettos which one enters ailing and comes out of pesti- 
lential." " Vice," says Edward Livingston, " is more 
contagious than disease." 

Transportation has replaced the convict prison, but 
the transported criminal, having had no fitting moral 
treatment, and being in constant relation with persons 
of evil disposition, comes back as bad as or worse than 
he went away. 

Solitary imprisonment injures the subject of it in 
.mind and character, unfits him for resuming his rela- 
tions with the community when he is discharged, and 
leads to insanity and to suicide. 

All too severe penalties are less likely to be inflicted 



846 PAGES TROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

than if they were more moderate, because the juries 
will try to fasten on some doubt so as to avoid their 
infliction. Magistrates are liable to grow cruel by the 
mere effect of habitually sentencing criminals. The 
old author of the " Antiquities of Paris " says that the 
origin of the criminal chamber of the Parliament, 
called the Tournelle, explains its name, which was 
given because the counsellors served in rotation, three 
months at a time ; perhaps, as he suggests, for the 
reason that the habit of condemning men to death was 
liable to render them hard-hearted and inhuman. It 
used to be thought that a certain magistrate in this 
community had become too used to flaying his eels, so 
to speak, and that he had grown somewhat too indif- 
ferent to the suffering he inflicted in the form of a sen- 
tence, though a kind-hearted body enough by nature. 

We are to have done with gibbets and fetters, then, 
for the most desperate offenders, and are to substitute 
moral hospitals. We are to give up the idea of pun- 
ishment for these unfortunates, and institute proper 
methods of palliative and curative treatment. If re- 
straint is used it is only as the strait-jacket is employed 
to keep a maniac from doing mischief ; if pain is in- 
flicted, it is only as a blister or a moxa is applied to a 
patient. M. Despine borrows a lesson from our fa- 
mous countryman, Rarey, whose treatment of horses 
was founded on a patient study of equine psychology. 
How much may be learned from studying the mental 
and moral characters and developments of children, 
and of the lower animals, we hardly know as yet, but 
it would not be very rash to predict that another gen- 
eration will see great volumes on Comparative Psy- 
chology and Psychological Embryology. 

It may seem rather singular to many readers, that 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 347 

while the most frightful acts are considered as proofs 
of innocence, that is, of moral idiocy, and to be treated 
as disease, not vindictively, offences less grave in as- 
pect are to be visited with penalties proportioned in 
kind and degree to their character. The whole ques- 
tion is how far there was an act of self-determination. 
If the person committing homicide, for instance, was 
destitute of moral instincts, as shown by his killing 
wholesale, without compunction, without remorse, with 
every kind of barbarity ; if he were in a violent pas- 
sion at the time ; if he were drunk, not having got 
drunk on purpose : he was an automaton that did mis- 
chief, to be sure, but was no more to blame for the par- 
ticular acts in question than a locomotive that runs off 
the track is to blame for the destruction it works. 
If, on the other hand, the criminal who had committed 
a less aggravated offence gave evidence that he had 
a consciousness he was doing wrong, and if there was 
no proof that he was blinded by passion or drink, he 
should undergo a moderate punishment to give him a 
salutary lesson and to deter others from doing like 
him. 

In short, the man who commits the most atrocious 
and multiplied enormities seems to be looked upon by 
M. Despine as in a state of moral mania ; and no su- 
perintendent of an insane asylum would consider the 
worst acts a patient suffering from mania could com- 
mit as so fitly calling for the employment of discipline 
as a slight offence committed by a jDatient who, though 
not perfectly sane, knew better than to do what he had 
done. 

The preventive treatment of crime is considered at 
length, but inasmuch as this includes pretty nearly 
every civilizing agency, and the elimination of pretty 



348 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

nearly every social wrong, it may be very briefly dis- 
posed of here. It involves the moral education of the 
people, — ^removing, combating, and suppressing all 
the causes of moral degradation, such as poverty, lux- 
ury, popular excitements, drunkenness, the contagion 
of bad passions, and restraining the publication of 
criminal trials and of debasing literature. Persons 
shown to be dangerous should be shut up, it is main- 
tained, before they have a chance to repeat their acts 
of violence or other wrong. 

This is a very suggestive hint. Do we not see, in 
certain well-known localities of our own city, gamblers 
and other sharpers, well known as such, lying in wait 
day after day for their victims, undisturbed by the 
very officers who from time to time parade the story 
of their breaking into apartments and capturing faro- 
tables, " chips," and similar implements of rascality 
in the dens at the doors of which these rogues watch 
for their prey ? and is there no way of dealing with 
them as the poor evening strollers are dealt with from 
time to time on the strength of their well-known char- 
acters and occupation ? Have not some of our great 
cities gangs of burglars whose business is as publicly 
notorious as any calling that is not advertised in the 
papers ? and must the law wait until they have robbed 
or killed some new victim before it undertakes to med- 
dle with them ? Honest-minded people may well ask 
why these dangerous persons should not be dealt with 
as summarily as harmless drunkards and homeless va- 
grants. Moral treatment might possibly do something 
for them, and even if it took the form of discipline, it 
might not hurt them. At any rate the community 
would be better protected, and the shameful insult of 
allowing these notorious rogues to have their regular 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 349 

stands, like the apple and orange women, would be 
spared to our citizens, A little something of the 
Turkish Cadi's methods infused into our city police 
management would be very refreshing. 

A principal object of this article is to call attention 
to the questions discussed in the very curious and re- 
markable work of M. Despine, and to the book itself 
as one which cannot fail to interest any reader who will 
take it up, whether he agrees with its somewhat star- 
tling propositions or not. The psychologist will be at- 
tracted by its studies of the working of motives in the 
minds of criminals ; the philanthropist will find con- 
firmation of many of his cherished beliefs ; the magis- 
trate may learn something which will cause him to think 
more leniently of the unhappy creatures whom he is 
compelled to sentence ; the divine may be led to recon- 
sider his traditional formula of human nature. How far 
the practical measures recommended may prove gener- 
ally applicable is another matter. They can be met at 
every step by the most obvious objections. Yet that 
they are founded in essential justice and true human- 
ity towards the criminal, very many will be ready to 
grant. What society in its present imperfect condi- 
tion cares most for is the cheapest and surest protec- 
tion against the effects of crime, not the moral educa- 
tion which is expected to prevent the formation of the 
criminal character, or the remedial measures which are 
to restore the criminal to moral sanity. That the 
movement of reform should be in this last direction is 
plain enough, but even M. Despine himself does not 
look forward to the time when sin and crime shall be 
educated out of the community. The millennium is a 
delightful vision, but our imaginations can hardly 
make it real to us when we see what men are as we 



350 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE, 

know them at present. Tlie evil-doers as well as tlie 
poor we have always with us. We cannot help smiling 
at the sanguine hopes of those simple-hearted reform- 
ers who look forward to the time when ginger will not 
be hot in the mouth ; when there shall be cakes but 
no ale ; 

When the roughs, as we call them, grown loving and dutiful, 
Shall worship the true and the pure and the beautiful, 
And, preying no longer as tiger and vulture do, 
All read " The Atlantic " as persons of culture do. 

What we are doing now is only getting ready for 
the twentieth century, and this book is full of sugges- 
tions of great social changes involving new duties 
which will call for the self-devotion of a yet unborn 
generation of brothers and sisters of charity. 

Independently of all the instruction the psycholo- 
gist will derive from this most interesting work, of the 
practical lessons it suggests or enforces, the reader who 
is in search of mere entertainment will find enough to 
keep him in good humor. There is always a peculiar 
delight in reading a book written in a foreign lan- 
guage, if we are tolerably familiar with that language. 
Effects of style which a native would never dream of, 
add to the value of whatever merit there is in what 
we are reading. An idea worded in our own tongue 
is like silver on silver ; the same idea reaching us 
through an alien idiom is like zinc on silver, — the 
contact produces a kind of galvanic effect. Besides, a 
Frenchman always amuses an English-speaking reader, 
with his dramatic way of putting things, no matter 
what he is talking about. He cannot give an account 
of his mother's funeral without provoking an Anglo^ 
Saxon's smile. One sentence must be quoted here in 
the original ; it illustrates this sub-ridiculous impres- 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 351 

sion made at a serious moment, — the incendiary was 
imprisoned for life, — and conveys at the same time in 
a neat and compendious form the leading doctrine of 
the work and the comment of " common-sense " as 
represented by one of the great tribe of the Pooh- 
Poohs : — 

Le President. Vous pretendez que la multiplicity 
des incendies est une preuve de la folic. En verite, 
les bras me tombent ! II suffira done de commettre 
six incendies pour etre consider^ comme un monomane, 
et vingt pour etre inviolable et sacre ! " 

We learn, too, the most wonderful things about our- 
selves in a Frenchman's books. Some years ago feu 
Monsieur Trousseau, the famous Parisian doctor, told 
the audience which listened to one of his lectures that 
if a milliner left the boulevards for Broadway, in six 
weeks after she had opened her shop the bonnets she 
made would frighten a Choctaw. M. Despine tells us 
we have in this country adherents of the sect of Ad- 
amites, a religious body which dispenses with all the 
disguises in the way of clothing which have been con- 
trived since the days of innocence. This could hardly 
be so far north as New England. Possibly he may 
refer to New York, where, as we know on the excel- 
lent authority of Mr. William Allen Butler, some of 
the persons who live in the most showy quarters of the 
city are so destitute that they literally have " nothing 
to wear." M. Despine quotes Mittermaier as saying 
that an incendiary was hung in Boston in 1846, the 
first for a long time, that incendiary fires became more 
frequent after that in the city and its neighborhood, 
and that an inquiry instituted by the government 
showed that all the incendiaries were present at the 
execution referred to. Two incendiaries, Russell and 



352 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

Crockett, were hung in Boston in 1836, and it has 
commonly been said that there were no more incendi- 
ary fires for a long time afterwards. The ingenuity 
of French writers in twisting English names and words 
into fanciful shapes is a never-failing source of pleas- 
ure in reading any of their books which give them a 
chance to do it. If they can get the' letters wrong 
they will. Thus we are introduced by M. Despine to 
Miss Marry Carpenter and Mr. Edgard Poe, and rec- 
ognize a well-known arrangement for affording health- 
ful, useful, but involuntary exercise and amusement to 
convicts as Le Thredmill. Altogether one can find a 
good deal of entertainment in a book written with a 
very startling theory as its basis and a very important 
practical purpose as its chief end. Many who take it 
up with no higher aim than entertainment may find in 
its pages reasons for reconsidering their long-cherished 
views of human nature, the springs of human action, 
and the claims to commiseration of those who have 
been considered as self-elected outcasts, even while a 
social order in which justice is practically impossible 
treats them according to the law of expediency as 
locally and temporarily interpreted. 

Some books are edifices to stand as they are built ; 
some are hewn stones ready to form a part of future 
edifices ; some are quarries from which stones are to 
be split for shaping and after use. This book is a 
quarry of facts ; it furnishes many well-shaped infer- 
ences and conclusions ; and some of these are so put 
together that they may be considered as forming a 
threshold if not a porch for that fair temple of justice 
which we may hope is yet to be constructed. 

There is a considerable literature relating to the 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 353 

subject of prison reform, to wliicli only a brief refer- 
ence need be made in this connection, as the object of 
the paper before the reader is rather to open for him 
the question of the true moral condition of criminals 
as responsible beings in the light of an individual 
study of their mental conditions, than to deal with the 
practical matters which can only be properly handled 
by men of trained experience who devote themselves 
expressly to their consideration. 

The very intelligent and interesting reports and 
communications of Mr. F. B. Sanborn of Massachu- 
setts, as Secretary of the Board of State Charities and 
as member of the Social Science Association, are full 
of information with reference to the reformatory meth- 
ods which have been on trial, more especially during 
the last twenty years. Of these, the Irish system, so 
called, the invention of Captain Maconochie, carried 
out to some extent in Great Britain by Sir Walter 
Crofton, is the one most promising of lasting results. 
To state its principal features in a single sentence, it 
proceeds on the idea that no man is utterly incorrigi- 
ble, or at least that no man is to be dealt with on that 
supposition until proper efforts have been made to re- 
claim him ; that hope and not fear is the chief motive 
to be addressed to the criminal ; it makes provision 
that while he brings upon himseK, by his crime, conse- 
quences which prove a very severe discipline, he can 
yet by bis own effort obtain their gradual and pro- 
gressive alleviation, shortening of the term of impris- 
onment, relaxation of the most trying parts of the dis= 
cipline, and in due time promotion to what is called an 
intermediate prison, followed, where there is sufficient 
evidence of reformation of character and habits, by a 
conditional discharge, the restorerl x)atient, if we may 



354 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

call him so, still remaining under the general superin 
tendence of the moral health-officer commonly known 
as policeman. 

This Irish system is, our secretary says, " common- 
sense applied to convictSc" It is really an attempt to 
extend to moral unsoundness, which, as we have seen, 
often has many of the characters of congenital imper- 
fection, the reform which Pinel introduced into the 
treatment of common insanity. 

To see what can be done with boys and adolescents 
it is only necessary to refer to M. Bonneville de Mar- 
sangy's most interesting account of the Colonic Peni- 
tentiaire of Mettray. Allowing for the dramatic ele- 
ment which is born with the gesticulating Frenchman, 
and comes out in his rhetoric, the results claimed for 
that institution are extraordinary. The account given 
by M. Demetz of the " Maison Paternelle," where 
children from families of good condition who have 
proved refractory to domestic influences, young repro- 
bates dyed in the wool with perversity, are taken into 
a kind of moral bleachery and come out white as lambs, 
is still more surprising in the results alleged to have 
been obtained. 

The motives which have proved so efficient with 
young persons have been relied on by the two reform- 
ers to whom the Irish system is due, in the case of 
adults, and the best effects have followed their substi- 
tution for harsher measures. "The prevention of 
crime and the reformation of the criminal," says Mr. 
Sanborn, " are the great objects of prison discipline, 
and any system which does not secure these is costly 
at any price." But we must remember Lord Stan- 
ley's saying that " the reformation of men can never be- 
come a mechanical process." Those who look into the 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 355 

methods which have proved successful will see that 
they are the same by which savages and barbarians 
are reclaimed, so far as that is ever effected, namely, 
the personal efforts of self -devoted individuals. A 
system may be perfect, but if it is not administered 
by sincere and faithful agents, it is of little use. 

It need not be supposed that those who take the 
views of criminal psychology, of which M. Despine 
may be considered the extreme advocate, are always in 
favor of that emollient treatment of crime, of the in- 
fluence of which Coleridge gives an eloquent and 
slightly absurd portraiture in his tragedy of " Re- 
morse." The guilty creature whom " our pampered 
mountebanks " (my lord chief justice and other func- 
tionaries) have shut up in a dungeon is wrought upon 
by the influences of nature, — her 

" Sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets, 
(Her) melodies of woods and winds and waters, 
Till he relent, and can no more endure 
To be a jarring and a dissonant thing 
Amid this general dance and minstrelsy ; 
But, bursting into tears, wins back his way, 
His angry spirit healed and harmonized 
By the benignant touch of love and beauty." 

Such hopeful and florid anticipations indulged with 
reference to a criminal like Mrs. Brownrigg — 

" Does thou ask her crime ? 
She whipped two female 'prentices to death 
And hid them in the coal-hole " — 

might well provoke the satire of the author of the 
" Needy Knife-Grinder " and the laugh of the readers 
of the " Anti-Jacobin." 

But it is not every reformer who would confine soci- 
ety to " secondary punishments," excluding capital 



356 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ones, and it is not a necessary consequence of " physi- 
ological " views of the criminal nature, that sharp dis- 
cipline shall not be applied to it. M. Bonneville de 
Marsangy, an old and experienced judge, whose work 
on the amelioration of the criminal law is of very high 
authority with prison reformers, says, with reference 
to the case of Dumollard, and M. Victor Hugo's plea 
against capital punishment, " I add that if, having to 
pronounce against one of those abominable attempts 
which shock the feelings of the public, the jury, guided 
by false notions of philanthropy, should at the present 
time reject the death penalty, it would in so doing 
thrust back all civilization ; for in annulling the su- 
preme guaranty of public security, it would infallibly 
restore the era of private revenges, and with these all 
the bloody and horrible reprisals of barbarous ages." 
It seems a little singular to find a magistrate writing 
in behalf of the criminal, recognizing not the less the 
claims of instinct even in the form of lynch -law. 
Insanity itself is not necessarily a sufficient reason 
against discipline, and it is the esoteric opinion of a 
celebrated expert that a whipping may, under certain 
circumstances, be very useful to a patient who is not in 
full possession of his reason. Captain Maconochie, 
the father of the Irish system, does not condemn punish- 
ment, as such, but believes it indispensable. It is not, 
however, to be administered as a vindictive measure, 
but as a benevolent means, having reform for its ob- 
ject. His men at Norfolk Island, where the experi- 
ment was first instituted, had to endure the legal pen- 
alties of imprisonment and hard labor, in the fullest 
sense of the words, as a retribution of their misdoings. 
Mr. Sanborn believes that habitual criminals should 
be sentenced for much longer periods than they com- 



CRIME AND AUTOMATISM. 357 

monly are, — twice and even three times as long. Ob- 
viously these reformers are not fanatics ; they are not 
ultraists and Utopians ; they have striking results to 
show, and the objections and obstacles they have to 
encounter are such as the advanced guard of every on- 
ward movement of society must expect to encounter. 

In looking over this whole subject we must re- 
member that antlu'opology is in its infancy, in spite 
of the heaven-descended precept of antiquity and the 
copy-book pentameter line of Pope. Instinct still 
moves in us as it did in Cain and those relatives of 
his who he was afraid would lynch him. Law comes 
to us from a set of marauders who cased themselves in 
iron, and the possessions they had won by conquest in 
edicts as little human in their features as the barred 
visors that covered their faces. Poor fantastic Dr. 
Robert Knox was still groaning in 1850 over the bat- 
tle of Hastings ; not quite ineptly, it may be. Our 
most widely accepted theologies owe their dogmas to 
a few majority votes passed by men who would have 
hanged our grandmothers as witches and burned our 
ministers as heretics. 

Insanity was possession in times well remembered. 
Malformed births, " monsters," as they were called, 
frightened our New England fathers almost as much 
as comets, the legitimate origin and harmless character 
of which eccentric but well-meaning citizens of the 
universe had to be defended against learned and ex- 
cellent John Prince, the minister of the Old South, 
by Professor Pierce's predecessor at the fifth remove 
in the Chair of Mathematics and Natural Philoso- 
phy of Harvard University. Abbas (probably Haly 
Abbas, the great physician), says Haller, came very 



358 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OP LIFE. 

near being thrown away, at his birth, as a monster. 
By and by came the nineteenth century, and Geoff roy- 
Saint-Hilaire's treatise on " Teratology," which did for 
malformations what Cuvier's " Ossemens Fossiles " did 
for the lusus naturoe^ as fossil organic remains were 
called by the old observers of curious natural phe- 
nomena. 

Just in the same way moral anomalies must be stud- 
ied. " Psychology," says M. Eibot (" Heredity," trans- 
lation, London, 1875), " like physiology, has its rare 
cases, but unfortunately not so much trouble has been 
taken to note and describe them. — There are some 
purely moral states which are met with in a certain 
class of criminals — murderers, robbers, and incen- 
diaries — which, if we renounce all prejudices and 
preconceived opinions, can only be regarded as phys- 
iological accidents, more painful and not less incur- 
able than those of deaf -muteness and blindness. — 
These creatures, as Dr. Lucas says, partake only of 
the form of man ; there is in their blood somewhat of 
the tiger and of the brute : they are innocently crim- 
inal, and sometimes are capable of every crime." The 
writer of this article may perhaps be pardoned for say- 
ing that he published in the year 1860 a tale which 
he has never forgiven one of his still cherished and 
charming friends for calling " a medicated novel," the 
aim of which was to illustrate this same innocently 
criminal automatism with the irresponsibility it im- 
plies, by the supposed mechanical introduction before 
birth of an ophidian element into the blood of a hu- 
man being. 

How different are the views brought before the 
reader in this paper, as regards the range of the hu- 
man will and the degree of human accountability, 



CKIME AND AUTOMATISM. 359 

from those taught by the larger number of the persons 
to whom we are expected to look for guidance, is plain 
enough. They may dispute the dogma " omnis peccans 
est ignorans,^^ if they will, but they cannot efface the 
prayer " forgive them, for they know not what they 
do," which recognizes moral blindness, nor the peti- 
tion "lead us not into temptation," which recognizes 
moral infirmity. Moral psychology does no more for 
the criminal than to furnish a comprehensive commen- 
tary on these two texts. If we cannot help feeling 
more and more that it is God who worketh in us to 
will and to do, by the blood we inherit amd the nur- 
ture we receive ; nay, even if the destructive analy- 
sis of our new schoolmen threatens to distil away all 
we once called self-determination and free-will, leav- 
ing only a caput mortuum of animal substance and 
" strongest motive," we need not be greatly alarmed. 

For the belief in a power of self-determination, and 
the idea of possible future remorse connected with it, 
will still remain with all but the moral incapables, — 
and the metaphysicians, — and this belief can be ef- 
fectively appealed to and will furnish a " strongest 
motive " readily enough in a great proportion of cases. 
In practice we must borrow a lesson from martial law. 
A sentry does not go to sleep at his post, because he 
knows he will be shot if he does. Society must pre- 
sent such motives of fear to the criminally disposed as 
are most effective in the long run for its protection. 
Its next duty is to the offender, who has his rights, 
were these only to be hanged with a rope strong 
enough to hold his weight, by an artist who under- 
stands his business. A criminal, as we now contem- 
plate him, may deserve our deepest pity and tenderest 
care as much as if he were the tenant of a hospital or 



360 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

an asylum instead of a prison. And in the infliction 
of the gravest penalties it must not be taken for 
granted that while we are punishing " crime " we are 
punishing sin, for if this last were in court the pris- 
oner might not rarely sit in judgment on the magis* 
trate. 



XL 

JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

As the centennial anniversaries of noteworthy events 
and signal births come round, frequent and importu- 
nate as tax-bills, fearful with superlatives as school- 
girls' letters, wearisome with iteration as a succession 
of drum-solos, noisy with trumpet-blowing through the 
land as the jubilee of Israel, we are, perhaps, in dan- 
ger of getting tired of reminiscences. A foreigner 
might well think the patron saint of America was 
Saint Anniversary. As our aboriginal predecessors 
dug up the bones of their ancestors when they removed 
from one place ta another, and carried them with the 
living on their journey, so we consider it a religious 
duty, at stated intervals in the journey of time, to ex- 
hume the memories of dead personages and events, and 
look at them in the light of the staring and inquisitive 
present, before consigning them again to the sepul- 
chre. 

A recent centennial celebration seems to make this 
a fitting time for any of us, who may feel a call or an 
inclination, to examine the life and religious teachings 
of a man of whom Mr. Bancroft has said, referring to 
his relations to his theological successors, that " his 
influence is discernible on every leading mind. Bel- 
lamy and Hopkins were his pupils ; D wight was his 
expositor ; Smalley, Emmons, and many others were 
his followers ; through Hopkins his influence reached 



362 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

Kirkland, and assisted in moulding the character of 
Clianning." 

Of all the scholars and philosophers that America 
had produced before the beginning of the present cen- 
tury, two only had established a considerable and per- 
manent reputation in the world of European thought, 
— Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards. No 
two individuals could well differ more in tempera- 
ment, character, beliefs, and mode of life than did 
these two men, representing respectively intellect, prac- 
tical and abstract. Edwards would have called Frank- 
lin an infidel, and turned him over to the uncovenanted 
mercies, if, indeed, such were admitted in his pro- 
gramme of the Divine administration. Franklin would 
have called Edwards a fanatic, and tried the effect of 
" Poor Richard's " common-sense on the major prem- 
ises of his remorseless syllogisms. 

We are proud of the great Boston-born philosopher, 
who snatched the thunderbolt from heaven with one 
hand, and the sceptre from tyranny with the other. 
So, also, we are proud of the great New England di- 
vine, of whom it might be said quite as truly, " Eri- 
puit coelo fulmen." Did not Dugald Stewart and Sir 
James Mackintosh recognize his extraordinary ability? 
Did not Robert Hall, in one of those " fits of easy 
transmission," in which loose and often extravagant 
expressions escape from excitable minds, call him " the 
greatest of the sons of men " ? Such praise was very 
rare in those days, and it is no wonder that we have 
made the most of these and similar fine phrases. We 
always liked the English official mark on our provin- 
cial silver, and there was not a great deal of it. 

In studying the characteristics of Edwards in his 
life and writings, we find so much to remind us of 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 363 

Pascal that, if we believed in the doctrine of metem- 
psychosis, we could almost feel assured that the Cath- 
olic had come back to earth in the Calvinist. Both 
were of a delicate and nervous constitution, habitual 
invalids. Their features, it is true, have not so much 
in common. The portrait prefixed to D wight's edition 
of Edwards's works shows us a high forehead, a calm, 
steady eye, a small, rather prim mouth, with something 
about it of the unmated and no longer youthful fe- 
male. The medallion of Pascal shows a head not large 
in the dome, but ample in the region of the brow, 
strongly marked features, a commanding Roman nose, 
a square jaw, a questioning mouth, an asserting chin, 
— a look altogether not unlike that of the late Rever- 
end James Walker, except for its air of invalidism. 
Each was remarkable for the precocious development 
of his observing and reflecting powers. Their spirit- 
ual as well as their mental conditions were parallel in 
many respects. Both had a strong tendency to asceti- 
cism. Pascal wore a belt studded with sharp points 
turned inward, which he pressed against his body when 
he felt the aggressive movements of temptation. He 
was jealous of any pleasure derived from the delicacy 
of his food, which he regarded solely as the means of 
supporting life. Edwards did not wear the belt of 
thorns in a material shape, but he pricked himself with 
perpetual self-accusations, and showed precisely the 
same jealousy about the gratification of the palate. 
He was spared, we may say in parenthesis, the living 
to see the republication in Boston of his fellow-coun- 
tryman. Count Rumford's, essay " Of the Pleasure of 
Eating, and of the Means that may be employed for 
increasing it." Pascal and Edwards were alike sensi- 
tive, pure in heart and in life, profoundly penetrated 



864 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

with the awful meaning; of human existence ; both 
filled with a sense of their own littleness and sinful- 
ness ; both trembling in the presence of God and 
dwelling much upon his wrath and its future manifes- 
tations ; both singularly powerful as controversialists, 
and alive all over to the gaudia certaminis, — one 
fighting the Jesuits and the other the Arminians. They 
were alike in their retiring and melancholy kind of 
life. Pascal was a true poet who did not care to wear 
the singing robes. As much has been claimed for Ed- 
wards on the strength of a passage here and there 
which shows sentiment and imagination. But this was 
in his youthful days, and the " little white flower " 
of his diary fades out in his polemic treatises, as the 
" star of Bethlehem " no longer blossoms when the 
harsh blades of grass crowd around it. Pascal's prose 
is light and elastic everywhere with esprit ; much of 
that of Edwards, thickened as it is with texts from 
Scripture, reminds us of the unleavened bread of the 
Israelite: holy it may be, but heavy it certainly is. 
The exquisite wit which so delights us in Pascal could 
not be claimed for Edwards ; yet he could be satirical 
in a way to make the gravest person smile, — as in the 
description of the wonderful animal the traveller tells 
of as inhabiting Terra del Fuego, with which he laughs 
his opponents to scorn in his treatise on the " Freedom 
of the Will." Both had the same fondness for writ- 
ing in the form of aphorisms, — natural to strong 
thinkers, who act like the bankers whose habit it is to 
sign checks, but not to count out money, — and both 
not rarely selected the same or similar subjects for 
their brief utterances. 

Even in some external conditions Pascal and Ed- 
wards suggest comparison. Both were greatly influ' 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 365 

enced by devout, spiritually-minded women. Pascal, 
who died unmarried, had his two sisters, — Gilberte 
and Jacqueline, — the first of whom, afterwards Ma- 
dame Perier, wrote the Memoir of her brother, so 
simply, so sweetly, that one can hardly read it with- 
out thinking he hears it in her own tender woman's 
voice, — as if she were audibly shaping the syllables 
which are flowing through his mute consciousness. 
Edwards's wife, Sarah Pierrepont, was the lady of 
whom he wrote the remarkable account (cited by Mr. 
Bancroft in his article on Edwards, as it stands in 
the first edition of Appleton's " Cyclopaedia ") before 
he had made her acquaintance, — she being then only 
thirteen years old. She was spiritual to exaltation 
and ecstasy. To his sister Jerusha, seven years younger 
than himself, he was tenderly attached. She, too, was 
of a devoutly religious character. 

There were certain differences in the midst of these 
parallelisms. Auvergne, with its vine-clad slopes, was 
not the same as Connecticut, with its orchards of el- 
bowed apple-trees. Windsor, a pleasant name, not 
wanting in stately associations, sounds less romantic 
than Clermont. We think of Blaise and Jacqueline, 
wandering in the shadow of Puy de Dome^ and kneel- 
ing in the ancient cathedral in that venerable town 
where the first trumpet of the first crusade was blown ; 
and again we see Jonathan and Jerusha straying across 
lots to Poquannock, or sitting in the cold church, side 
by side on the smileless Sabbath. Whether or not Ed- 
wards had ever read Pascal is not shown by any refer- 
ence in his writings, but there are some rather curious 
instances of similar or identical expressions. Thus the 
words of his sermon, in which he speaks of sinners as 
" in the hands of an angry God," are identical in mean- 



366 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OP LIFE. 

ing with Pascal's " dans les mains d'un Dieu irrit^." 
His expression applied to man, " a poor little worm," 
sounds like a translation of Pascal's " chetif vermis- 
seau." A paragraph of his detached observations 
entitled "Body Infinite," reminds one of the second 
paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of Pascal's 
" Pensees." These resemblances are worth noting in 
a comparison of the two writers. Dealing with similar 
subjects, it is not strange to fimd them using similar 
expressions. But it seems far from unlikely that Ed- 
wards had fallen in with a copy of Pascal, and bor- 
rowed, perhaps unconsciously, something of his way 
of thinking. 

We may hope that their spirits have met long ago 
in a better world, for each was a saintly being, who 
might have claimed for him the epithet applied to 
Spinoza. But if they had met in this world, Pascal 
would have looked sadly on Edwards as a heretic, and 
Edwards would have looked sternly on Pascal as a pa- 
pist. Edwards, again, would have scouted an Armin- 
ian ; but to Bossuet, the great Bishop of Meaux, a 
Socinian, even, was only a developed Calvinist. 

The feeling which naturally arises in contemplating 
the character of Jonathan Edwards is that of deep 
reverence for a man who seems to have been anointed 
from his birth ; who lived a life pure, laborious, self- 
denying, occupied with the highest themes, and busy 
in the highest kind of labor, — such a life as in another 
church might have given him a place in the " Acta 
Sanctorum." We can in part account for what he 
was when we remember his natural inherited instincts, 
his training, his faith, and the conditions by which he 
was surrounded. His ancestors had fed on sermons 
so long that he must have been born with Scriptural 



JONATHAN EDWAEDS. 367 

texts lying latent in his embryonic tliinking- marrow, 
like the undeveloped picture in a film of collodion. 
He was bred in the family of a Connecticut minister 
in a town where revivals of religion were of remarka- 
ble frequency. His mother, it may be suspected, found 
him in brains, for she was called the brighter of the 
old couple ; and the fact that she did not join the 
church until Jonathan was twelve years old implies 
that she was a woman who was not to be hurried into 
becoming a professor of religion simply because she 
was the wife of the Reverend Timothy Edwards. 
His faith in the literal inspiration of the Old and 
New Testament was implicit; it was built on texts, 
as Venice and Amsterdam are built on piles. The 
" parable of Eden," as our noble Boston preacher calls 
it, was to him a simple narrative of exact occurrences. 
The fruit, to taste which conferred an education, the 
talking ophidian, the many-centuried patriarchs, the 
floating menagerie with the fauna of the drowning 
earth represented on its decks, the modelling of the 
first woman about a bone of the first man — all these 
things were to him, as to those about him, as real 
historical facts as the building of the Pyramids. He 
was surrounded with believers like himself, who held 
the doctrines of Calvinism in all their rigor. But, 
on the other hand, he saw the strongholds of his posi- 
tion threatened by the gradual approach or the act- 
ual invasion of laxer teachings and practices, so that 
he found himself, as he thought, forced into active hos- 
tilities, and soon learned his strength as a combatant, 
and felt the stern delight of the warrior as cham- 
pion of the church militant. This may have given 
extravagance to some of his expressions, and at times 
have blinded him to the real meaning as well as to the 



368 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

practical effect o£ the doctrines lie taught to the good 
people of Northampton, and gave to the world in 
pages over which many a reader has turned pale and 
trembled. 

In order to get an idea of what the theological sys- 
tem is of which he was the great New England expo- 
nent, we will take up briefly some of its leading fea- 
tures. It is hardly necessary to say that Edwards's 
main doctrines agree with those of the Westminster 
Assembly's two catechisms. These same doctrines al- 
most assumed the character of a state religion when 
the " Confession of Faith " of the Synod assembled in 
Boston, May 12, 1680, was printed by an Order of the 
General Court of Massachusetts, passed May 19 of 
the same year. But we are to look at these doctrines 
as Edwards accepted and interpreted them. 

The God of Edwards is not a Trinity, but a Qua- 
ternity. The fourth Person is an embodied abstrac- 
tion, to which he gave the name of Justice. As Jupi- 
ter was governed by Fate, so Jehovah is governed by 
Justice. This takes precedence of all other elements 
in the composite Divinity. Its province is to demand 
satisfaction^ though as its demand is infinite, it can 
never be satiated. This satisfaction is derived from 
the infliction of misery on sensitive beings, who, by 
the fact of coming into existence under conditions pro- 
vided or permitted by their Creator, have incurred his 
wrath and received his curse as their patrimony. Its 
work, as in the theology of Dante, is seen in the con- 
struction and perpetual maintenance of an Inferno^ 
which Edwards mentions to ears polite and impolite 
with an unsparing plainness, emphasis, and frequency 
such as would have contented the satirical Cowper. 
The familiar quotation, — 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 369 

" Quantum vertice ad auras 
^therias, tantuni radice ad Tartara tendit," — 

is eminently applicable to Edwards's theology ; it flow- 
ers in heaven, but its roots, from which it draws its 
life and its strength, reach down to the deepest depths 
of heU. 

The omnipotence of Justice is needed in his system, 
for it is dealing, as was said above, with infinite de- 
mands, which nothing short of it could begin to meet. 
The proof of this is a very simple mathematical one, 
and can be made plain to the most limited intelligence. 

Sin^ which is the subject of Justice, gets its meas- 
ure by comparing it with the excellence of the Being 
whose law it violates. As the Being is infinite in per- 
fections, every sin against him acquires the character 
of infinite magnitude. " Justice " demands a punish- 
ment commensurate with its infinite dimensions. This 
is the ground upon which the eternity of future pun- 
ishment is an imperative condition prescribed by " Jus- 
tice " to the alleged omnipotence of the Creator. Who 
and what is the being made subject to this infinite 
penalty ? 

Man^ as Edwards looks at him, is placed in a very 
singular condition. He has innumerable duties and 
not the smallest right, or the least claim on his Maker. 
In this doctrine Edwards differs from the finer and 
freer thinker with whom I have compared him. " There 
is a reciprocal duty between God and man," is one of 
Pascal's noblest sayings. No such relation exists for 
Edwards ; and if at any time there seems a balance in 
favor of the creature, the sovereignty of the Creator 
is a sponge which wipes out all and costs nothing, — ■ 
nothing but the misrry of a human being ; and after 
all, in the view of the saints, which must be correct, 



370 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

we are assured by Edwards that it will all be rigbt, for 
" the glory of God will in their estimate be of greater 
consequence than the welfare of thousands and mill- 
ions of souls." Man, since Adam's fall, is born in a 
state of moral inability, — a kind of spiritual hemi- 
plegia. He is competent, as we have seen, to commit 
an infinite amount of sin, but he cannot of himself 
perform the least good action. He is hateful to his 
Maker, ex officio^ as a human being. It is no wonder 
that Edwards uses hard words about such a being. 
This is a specimen from one of those sermons to which 
the long-suffering people of Northampton listened for 
twenty-four years : " You have never loved God, who 
is infinitely glorious and lovely ; and why then is God 
under obligations to love you, who are all over de- 
formed and loathsome as a filthy worm, or rather a 
hateful viper? " And on the very next page he re- 
turns to his epithets and comparisons, paying his re- 
spects to his fellow-creatures in the following words : 
" Seeing you thus disregard so great a God, is it a hei- 
nous thing for God to slight you, a little wretched, 
despicable creature ; a worm, a mere nothing and less 
than nothing ; a vile insect that has risen up in con- 
tempt against the Majesty of heaven and earth ? " 
We can hardly help remarking just here that this kind 
of language will seem to most persons an unwholesome 
sort of rhetoric for a preacher to indulge in ; not fa- 
vorable to the sweetness of his own thoughts, and not 
unlikely to produce irritation in some of his more ex- 
citable hearers. But he was led, as it will soon appear, 
into the use of expressions still more fitted to disturb 
the feelings of all persons of common sensibility, and 
especially of the fathers and mothers who listened to 
him. Such was Edwards's estimate of humanity. 



JONATHAN EDWAKDS. 371 

His opinion of the Devil is hardly more respectful 
than that which he entertains of man. " Though the 
Devil be exceedingly crafty and subtle," he says, " yet 
he is one of the greatest fools and blockheads in the 
world, as the subtlest of wicked men are." But for 
all he was such a fool, he has played a very important 
part, Edwards thinks, in the great events of the 
world's history. He was in a dreadful rage just before 
the flood. He brought about the peopling of America 
by leading men and women there so as to get them 
out of the way of the gospel. Thus he was, according 
to Edwards, the true Pilgrim Father of the New 
World. He himself had seen the Devil prevail against 
two revivals of religion in this country. The personal 
presence of the great enemy of mankind was as real 
to Edwards as the spectral demons in the woods about 
Gloucester, which the soldiers fired at but could not 
hit, were to Cotton Mather and his reverend corre- 
spondent. How the specialty of the archfiend differed 
from that of Edwards's " Justice " is not perfectly 
clear, except that one executes what the other orders, 
the Evil Angel finding pleasure in inflicting torture, 
and "Justice" attaining the end known to theologians 
as " satisfaction " in seeing it inflicted. And as Ed- 
wards couples his supreme principle with an epithet 
corresponding to a well - known human passion, — 
speaking of it as " revenging justice," — we can have 
some idea of what " satisfaction " means in the light 
of the common saying that " revenge is sweet ; " but 
the explanation does not leave the soul in seraphic 
harmony with the music of the spheres or the key-note 
of its own being. 

It will be enough for our present purpose to refer 
briefly to the leading doctrines of several of Edwards's 
special works. 



372 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OP LIPE. 

In his treatise, " The Great Christian Doctrine of 
Original Sin defended," he teaches that " God, in his 
constitution with Adam, dealt with him as a public 
person, — as the head of the human species, — and 
had respect to his posterity, as included in him." 
Again : " God dealing with Adam as the head of his 
posterity (as has been shown) and treating them as 
one, he deals with his posterity as having all sinned 
in himr There was always a difficulty in dealing with 
the relation of infants to the divine government. It 
is doubtful whether Edwards would have approved of 
the leniency of their sentence in Michael Wiggles- 
worth's "Day of Doom," in which the comparatively 
comfortable quarters of 

" The easiest room in hell " 

are assigned to the little creatures. Edwards argues 
against the charitable supposition that, though sin is 
truly imputed to infants, so that they are as a conse- 
quence, exposed to a proper punishment, yet that all 
Adam's guilt not being imputed to them, they might 
be let off with only temporal death or annihilation. 
He maintains, on the contrary, " that none can, in 
good consistence with themselves, own a real imputa- 
tion of the guilt of Adam's first sin to his posterity, 
without owning that they ^iHQ justly treated as sinners, 
truly guilty, and children of wrath^ on that account ; 
nor unless they allow a just imputation of the whole 
of the evil of that transgression, at least all that per- 
tains to that act, as a full and complete violation of 
the covenant which God had established ; even as 
much as if each one of mankind had the like covenant 
established with him singly, and had, by the like di- 
rect and full act of rebellion, violated it himself." The 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 373 

little albuminous automaton is not sent into tlie world 
without an inheritance. Every infant of the human 
race is entitled to one undivided share of the guilt and 
consequent responsibility of the Trustee to whom the 
Sovereign had committed its future, and who invested 
it in a fraudulent concern. 

By the " Work of Redemption," of which Edwards 
wrote an elaborate history, a few of the human race 
have been exempted from the infinite penalties conse- 
quent upon being born upon this planet, the atmos- 
phere of which is a slow poison, killing everybody 
after a few score of years. But " the bulk of man- 
kind " go eventually to the place prepared for them 
by " Justice," of which place and its conditions Ed- 
wards has given full and detailed descriptions. 

The essay on " God's Chief End in Creation " 
reaches these two grand results : " God aims at satisfy- 
ing justice in the eternal damnation of sinners, which 
will be satisfied with their damnation considered no 
otherwise than with regard to its eternal duration. 
God aims to satisfy his infinite grace or benevolence 
by the bestowment of a good infinitely valuable be- 
cause eternal." 

His idea of the " Nature of True Virtue," as ex- 
pressed in his treatise with that title, is broad enough 
for the TO KaXnv of the most ancient or the most modern 
philosophy. A principle of virtue is, according to Ed- 
wards, " union of heart to being, simply considered ; 
which implies a disposition to benevolence to being, 
in general." This definition has been variously esti- 
mated by philosophical critics. There is something in 
it which reminds one of the " ether " of the physicists. 
This is a conceivable if not a necessary medium, but 
no living thing we know anything about can live in 



874 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

it, can fly or breathe in it, and we must leave it to 
the angels, with whose physiology we are not ac- 
quainted. 

The full title of the work on which Edwards's repu- 
tation as a thinker mainly rests is, " A careful and 
strict Inquiry into the modern prevailing notions of 
that Freedom of the Will which is supposed to be es- 
sential to moral agency, virtue and vice, reward and 
punishment, praise and blame." 

Edwards thinks it necessary to meet those who ob- 
ject to reasonings like his that they run " into nice 
scholastic distractions and abstruse metaphysical sub- 
tleties, and set these in opposition to common-sense." 
But an essay which Robert Hall read and re-read with 
intense interest before he was nine years old must 
have a good deal in it which comes within the compass 
of moderate understandings. The truth is, his argu- 
ment, unfolded with infinite patience and admirable 
ingenuity, is nothing but a careful evolution of the im- 
possibilities involved in the idea of that old scholastic 
thesis best known in the popular form of the puzzle 
called in learned books V dne de Buridan^ and in com- 
mon speech "the ass between two bundles of hay,'* 
— or as Leibnitz has it, between two pastures. A 
more dignified statement of it is to be found at the be- 
ginning of the fourth canto of Dante's " Paradiso." 
The passage is thus given in Mr. Longfellow's transla- 
tion : — 

" Between two viands equally removed 
And tempting, a free man /would die of hunger, 
Ere either he could bring unto his teeth." 

The object of Edwards was to prove that such a state 
of equilibrium, supposed by his Arminian opponents 
to be necessary to account for human freedom and re- 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 375 

sponsibility, does not and cannot exist. Leibnitz had 
already denied its possibility without any express act 
of the Creator. 

The reader of this celebrated treatise may well ad- 
mire the sleuth-hound-like sagacity and tenacity with 
which the keen-scented reasoner follows the devious 
tracks of his adversaries ; yet he can hardly help feel- 
ing that a vast number of words have been expended 
in proving over and over again a proposition which, as 
put by the great logician, is self-evident. In fact, Ed- 
wards has more than once stated his own argument 
with a contemptuous brevity, as if he felt that he had 
been paying out in farthings what he could easily 
hand us in the form of a shilling. Here is one of his 
condensed statements : — 

" There is no high degree of refinement and abstruse specula- 
tion in determining that a thing is not before it is, and so cannot 
be the cause of itself ; or that the first act of free choice has not 
another act of free choice going before that to excite or direct 
it ; or in determining that no choice can be made wliile the mind 
remains in a state of absolute indifference ; that preference and 
equilibrium never co-exist ; and that therefore no choice is made 
in a state of liberty consisting in indifference ; and that so far as 
the Will is determined by motives, exhibiting and operating pre- 
vious to the act of the WlQ, so far it is not determined by the act 
of the Will itself ; that nothing can begin to be, which before 
was not, without a cause, or some antecedent ground or reason 
why it then begins to be ; that effects depend on their causes, 
and are connected with them ; that virtue is not the worse, nor 
sin the better, for the strength of mclination with which it is 
practised, and the difficulty which thence arises of doing other- 
wise ; that when it is already infallibly known that the thing will 
be, it is not contingent whether it will ever be or no ; or that it 
«an be truly said, notwithstanding, that it is not necessary it 
should be, but it either may be, or may not be." 

This subject of the freedom of the will, which Mil- 



376 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

ton's fallen angels puzzled over, and found themselves 

" In wandering mazes lost," — 

of which Chaucer's " Nonne's Preeste " says, • — 

" That in scole is gret altercation 
In this matere and gret disputison, 
And hath ben of an hundred thousand men,"- 

is one which we can hardly touch without becoming 
absorbed in its contemplation. We are all experts in 
the matter of volition. We may have read much or 
little ; we may have made it a special subject of 
thought or not : each of us has at any rate been using 
his will during every waking hour of his life, and must 
have some practical acquaintance with its working 
within him. 

The drift of Edwards's argument is to show that, 
though we are free to follow our will, we are not free 
to form an act of volition, but that this of necessity 
obeys the strongest motive. As the natural man — 
that is every man since the fall of Adam — is corrupt 
in all his tendencies, it follows that his motives, and 
consequently his moral volitions, are all evil until 
changed by grace, which is a free gift to such as are 
elected from eternity according to God's good pleas- 
ure. " The doctrine of a self -determining will as the 
ground of all moral good and evil tends to prevent 
any proper exercises of faith in God and Christ in the 
affair of our salvation, as it tends to prevent all de- 
pendence upon them." 

In spite of any general assertions of Edwards to the 
contrary, we find our wills tied up hand and foot in 
the logical propositions which he knots inextricably 
about them ; and yet when we lay down the book, we 
feel as if there was something left free after all. We 



JONATHAN EDWAKDS. 377 

cannot lielp saying E pur si mtcove. We are disposed 
to settle the matter as magisterially as Dr. Johnson 
did. " Sir," said he, " we know our will is free, and 
there's an end on 't." 

Not so certainly do we know this, perhaps, as 
the great dogmatist affirms. "A wooden top," says 
Hobbes, " that is lashed by the boys, and runs about, 
sometimes to one wall, sometimes to another, some- 
times spinning, sometimes hitting men on the shins, if 
it were sensible of its own motion would think it pro- 
ceeded from its own will, unless it felt what lashed it. 
And is a man any wiser when he runs to one place for 
a benefice, to another for a bargain, and troubles the 
world with writing errors and requiring answers, be- 
cause he thinks he does it without other cause than his 
own will, and seeth not what are the lashings that 
cause that will ? " And in the same way Leibnitz 
speaks of the magnetic needle : if it took pleasure in 
turning to the north, it would suppose itself to be act- 
ing independently, not knowing anything of the mag- 
netic currents. 

So far, then, all is, or at least may be, purely me- 
chanical and necessitated, in spite of our feeling to the 
contrary. Kant solves the problem by taking the will 
out of the series of phenomena, and exempting it as a 
noumenon from the empirical laws of the phenomenal 
world, — from the conditions of cause and effect, as 
they exist in time. In this way he arrives at his 
"categorical imperative," the supreme "ought," which 
he recognizes as the moral legislator. His doctrine is 
satirically stated by Julius Miiller thus : " Kant im- 
putes to man, since he will make him entirely his own 
lawgiver, the contradictory task of separating himseK 
from himself in order to subject himself to himself." 



378 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

It is curious to see how Kant comes down virtually to 
the level of scepticism, if not of materialism, in the fol- 
lowing explanatory note, which makes the text little 
better than a promise to pay without a signature : — 

" The real morality of actions, their merit or demerit, and even 
that of our own conduct, is completely unknown to us. Our es- 
timates can relate only to their empirical character. How much 
is the result of the action of free-will, how much is to be ascribed 
to nature and to blameless error, or to a happy constitution of 
temperament (jaerito fortuncB), no one can discover, nor, for this 
reason, determine with perfect justice." 

Our distinguished fellow-countryman, Mr. Hazard, 
follows Dr. Samuel Clarke in recognizing in man the 
power of determining his own effort, in the act of voli- 
tion, without being first acted upon by any extrinsic 
power or force. Man is for him a " creative first 
cause," an independent power, as truly creating the 
future in the sphere of the finite as God himself in the 
sphere of the infinite. 

Physiological psychology has taken up the problem 
of the will as coming under the general laws of life. 
Cousin says of Hartley, that his " was the first attempt 
to join the study of intellectual man to that of physi- 
cal man." Whether this be strictly true or not, there 
is no doubt that Hartley gave a clear account of many 
of those automatic actions since grouped as belonging 
to the reflex function ; and that, leaving out his hy- 
pothesis of vibrations, his account of the development 
of volition from automatism in the infant is among 
the earliest — if not the earliest — of the efforts to 
show the transition from involuntary to voluntary ac- 
tion. Johannes Miiller followed in the same direction, 
and from the day when Galvani first noticed the 
twitching of a frog's hind legs, the reflex function has 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 379 

been followed upward farther and farther until it ap- 
pears in the " unconscious cerebration " of Dr. Ca,r- 
penter, and the localization of speech and certain 
special movements in certain portions of the brain. 
Our physiological psychology is looking to the vivisec- 
tionists and the pathologists for help in finding the re- 
lation between the mental and moral faculties and the 
nervous centres ; to learn from them the connection of 
living circuits and batteries ; possibly, not probably, to 
^ upon some particular portion of the brain where 
the will shall be found really enthroned, as Descartes 
vainly fancied that the soul is in the pineal gland. 

As the study of the individual reduces his seem- 
ingly seK-determined actions more and more to reflex 
action, to mechanism, in short, so we find that the 
study of mankind in communities, which constitutes 
history, resolves itseK more and more into manifesta- 
tions of the same reflex function. Why else does his- 
tory " repeat itself," but that communities of men, 
like those of bees and ants, act in the same way under 
the same conditions ? And in the last analysis, what 
are the laws of human nature but a generalized ex- 
, pression of the fact that every organ obeys its proper 
stimulus, and every act of volition follows its motive 
as inevitably as the weight falls if unsupported, and 
the spring recoils if bent ? 

The more we study the will in the way of analysis, 
the more strictly does it appear to be determined by 
the infinitely varied conditions of the individual. At 
the bottom of all these lies the moral " personal equa- 
tion " of each human being. Suppose sin were always 
literally red, — as it is in the figurative expressions, 
" though your sins be as scarlet," " though they be 
red like crimson," — in that case, it is very certain 



380 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

that many persons would be unable to distinguisb sin 
L'om virtue, if we suppose virtue to have a color also, 
and that color to be green. There is good reason to 
believe that certain persons are born more or less 
completely blind to moral distinctions, as others are 
born color-blind. Many examples of this kind maybe 
found in the " Psychologic Naturelle " of M. Prosper 
Despine, and our own criminal records would furnish 
notable instances of such imperfect natures. We are 
getting to be predestinarians as much as Edwards or 
Calvin was, only instead of universal corruption of 
nature derived from Adam, we recognize inherited 
congenital tendencies, — some good, some bad, — for 
which the subject of them is in no sense responsible. 
Edwards maintains that, in spite of his doctrine, 
" man is entirely, perfectly, and unspeakably different 
from a machine, in that he has reason and understand- 
ing, with a faculty of will, and so is capable of voli- 
tion and choice : in that his will is guided by the dic- 
tates or views of his understanding ; and in that his 
external actions and behavior, and in many respects 
also his thoughts and the exercises of his mind, are 
subject to his will." But all this only mystified his 
people, and the practical rural comment was in the 
well-known satirical saying, " You can and you can't, 
you shall and you shan't," and so forth, — the epigram 
that stung to death a hundred sermons based on the at- 
tempt to reconcile slavery to a depraved nature, on the 
one hand, with freedom to sin and responsibility for 
what could not be helped, on the other. 

It is as hard to leave this subject without attempting 
to help in clearing it up as it is to pass a cairn without 
the desire of throwing a stone upon it. This impulse 
must excuse the following brief excursion. 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 381 

In spite of the strongest-motive necessitarian doc- 
trine, we do certainly have a feeling, amounting to a 
working belief, that we are free to choose before we 
have made our choice. 

We have a sense of difficulty overcome by effort in 
many acts of choice. ; . 

We have a feeling in retrospect, amounting to a 
practical belief, that we could have left undone the 
things that we have done, and that we could have done 
the things that we ought to have done and did not do, 
and we accuse or else excuse ourselves accordingly. 

Suppose this belief to be a self-deception, as we 
have seen that Hobbes and Leibnitz suggest it may 
be, " a deceiving of mankind by God himself," as Ed- 
wards accuses Lord Kaimes of maintaining, still this 
instinctive belief in the power of moral choice in itself 
constitutes a powerful motive. Our thinking ourselves 
free is the key to our whole moral nature. " Possu- 
mus quia posse videmur." We can make a difficult 
choice because we think we can. Happily, no reason- 
ing can persuade us out of this belief; happily, in- 
deed, for virtue rests upon it, education assumes and 
develops it, law pronounces it^ verdict and the minis- 
ters of the law execute its mandates on the strength of 
it. Make us out automata if you will, but we are au- 
tomata which cannot help believing that they do their 
work well or ill as they choose, that they wind them- 
selves up or let themselves run down by a power not 
in the weights or springs. 

On the whole, we can afford to leave the question of 
liberty and necessity where Edwards leaves that of our 
belief in the existence of the material universe : — 

" Though we suppose that the Material Universe is absolutely 
dependent on Idea, yet we may speak in the old way and as prop- 
erly and truly as ever." 



382 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

"It is just all one as to any benefit or advantage, any end that 
we can suppose was proposed by the Creator, as if the Material 
Universe were existent in the same manner as is vulgarly thought." 

And so we can say that, after all the arguments of 
the metaphysicians, all the experiments of the physi- 
ologists^ all the uniform averages of statisticians, it is 
just all one as to any benefit or advantage as if a real 
self -determining power, and real responsibility for our 
acts of moral choice were existent in the same manner 
as is vulgarly thought. 

The " Treatise on Original Sin " deals with that 
subject in the usual mediaeval style. As a specimen 
of what we may call theological sharp practice, the 
reader may take the following passage. Edwards is 
arguing against the supposition that the doctrine of 
original sin implies, — 

" That nature must be corrupted by some positive influence, — 
' something by some means or other infused into the human na- 
ture ; some quality or other, not from the choice of our minds, 
but like a taint, tincture, or infection, altering the natural constitu- 
tion, faculties, and dispositions of our souls. That sin and evil 
dispositions are implanted in the fcetus in the womb.' Whereas 
our doctrine neither implies nor infers any such thing. In order 
to account for a sinful corruption of nature, yea, a total native 
depravity of the heart of man, there is not the least need of sup- 
posing any evil quality infused, implanted, or wrought into the na- 
ture of man, by any positive cause, or influence whatsoever, either 
from God, or the creature ; or of supposing that man is conceived 
and born with 3i fountain of evil m his heart, such as is anything 
■proT^erlj positive. I think a little attention to the nature of things 
will be sufficient to satisfy any impartial, considerate inquirer 
that the absence of positive good principles, and so the withhold- 
ing of a special divine influence to impart and maintain those 
good principles — leaving the common natural principles of self- 
love, natural appetite, etc., to themselves, without the govern- 
ment of superior divine principles — will certainly be followed 
with the corruption, yea, the total corruption of the heart, with- 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 383 

out occasion for any positive influence at all : and that it was thus 
in fact that corruption of nature came on Adam, immediately on 
his fall, and comes on all his posterity, as sinning in him, and fall- 
ing with him." 

The arclibisliop did not poison Ugolino and his 
boys, — he only withheld food from them. We will 
let Julius Miiller expose the fallacy : " But even by 
giving this turn to the question, the idea cannot be 
avoided of an implantation of the moral corruption 
in human nature by a Divine causality, as directly 
contradicting the religious axiom that God cannot be 
the author of sin ; for if from his Divine withdraw- 
ment the origination of the corrupt nature necessarily 
follows, then the former is just a cause of the latter." 
And to the same effect Professor Fisher allows that if 
God withdraws from the soul the grace without which 
it cannot but sin, "it is vain to urge that the act of 
God is of a negative character. . . . We do not see 
how the conclusion can be avoided that God is the au- 
thor of sin." 

There are conceptions which are not only false, not 
only absurd, but which act as disorganizing Jorces in 
the midst of the thinking apparatus. They injure the 
texture of the mind as a habit of gross sin injures the 
type of the character. Such is the idea that a de- 
scendant of Adam can in any way be guilty or reck- 
oned guilty of his sin. He may suffer for it, but that 
is his misfortune, and Justice should account to him 
for his suffering. " I could not help it " disarms 
vengeance and renders Tartarus a wanton luxury of 
cruelty. Edwards's powerful intellect was filled with 
disorganizing conceptions, like that which makes all 
mankind sinners thousands of years before they were 
bom. 



384 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

A cliief ground of complaint against Edwards is 
his use of language with reference to the future of 
mankind which shocks the sensibilities of a later gen- 
eration. There is no need of going into all the plans 
and machinery of his " Inferno," as displayed in his 
sermons. We can endure much in the mediaeval verse 
of Dante which we cannot listen to in the compara- 
tively raw and recent prose of Edwards. Mr. John 
Morley speaks in one of his Essays of " the horrors 
of what is perhaps the most frightful idea that has 
ever corroded human character, — the idea of eternal 
punishment." Edwards has done his best to burn 
these horrors into the souls of men. A new organic 
and a new inorganic chemistry are brought into the 
laboratory where " the bulk of mankind " have been 
conveyed for vivisection or vivicombustion. The body 
is to possess the most exquisite sensibilities, is to be 
pervaded in every fibre and particle by the fire, and 
the iire is to be such that our lime-kilns and iron-fur- 
naces would be refrigerators in comparison with the 
mildest of the torture-chambers. Here the great ma- 
jority of mankind are to pass the days and nights, if 
such terms are applicable to it, of a sleepless eternity. 
And all this apparatus of torture in full operation for 
" four thousand years," none of its victims warned of 
it or knowing anything about it until the "good news" 
came which brought life and immortality to light, — 
an immortality of misery to " the bulk of mankind ! " 

But Edwards can be partially excused for doing vio- 
lence to human feelings. It is better, perhaps, to con- 
fess that he was an imitator and a generous borrower 
than to allow him the credit of originality at the ex- 
pense of his better human attributes. Yery good men 
are sometimes very forgetful. The Rev. Thomas Scott 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 385 

was a very good man, no doubt, in many respects, but 
that excellent old friend of the writer, the late learned 
and amiable Dr. Jenks, says in an Editor's Notice, to 
be found in the fifth volume of " The Comprehensive 
Commentary " : " Nothing but such a diligent com- 
parison as this work necessarily required, of the labors 
of Henry and Scott, could have shown how greatly the 
latter was indebted to the former, especially in the Old 
Testament ; and the lack of acknowledgment can be 
accounted for, and reconciled with principle, only by 
the consideration, that, j)ossibly, if it had been made 
in every case where it was due, the work would have 
been less acceptable to persons of the ' establishment ' 
whom the writer was desirous to influence favorably." 
Was ever an indictment drawn in language more ten- 
derly modulated ? 

The Rev. Mr. Gillespie of Scotland, writing to Ed- 
wards, asks him, " Are the works of the great Mr. 
Boston known in your country, namely, the ' Fourfold 
State of Man ' ? " etc. To which Edwards replies : 
" As to Mr. Boston's ' View of the Covenant of Grace,' 
1 have had some opportunity to examine it, and I 
confess I do not understand the scheme of thought 
presented in that book. I have road his ' Fourfold 
State of Man,' and liked it exceedingly well. I think 
in that he shows himself to be a truly great divine." 

The Rev. Thomas Boston of Ettrick, Scotland, — 
an Ettrick shepherd very different from "Jamie the 
Poeter," as James Hogg was called by his rustic 
neighbors, — may be remembered as one of the au- 
thors largely cited by Mr. Buckle in his arraignment 
of the barbarous theology of Scotland. He died in 
1732, but the edition before the present writer, though 
without date, is evidently a comparatively recent one, 



386 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

and bears the impress, " Philadelpliia : Presbyterian 
Board of Publication." 

Something of the mild surprise which honest old 
Dr. Jenks experienced when he found the property of 
Matthew Henry on the person of Thomas Scott may 
be felt by scrupulous individuals at recognizing a large 
part of the awful language, with the use of which Ed- 
wards is often reproached, as the property of Thomas 
Boston. There is no mistaking the identity of many 
of these expressions and images. Some, besides the 
Scriptural ones, may have been borrowed by both writ- 
ers from a common source, but there is a considerable 
number which confess their parentage in the most un- 
equivocal way. The argmnent for infinite punishment 
is the same ; the fiery furnace the same ; the hair sus- 
pending a living soul over it the same ; reptiles and 
other odious images belong to both alike ; infinite du- 
ration is described in similar language ; the natural 
affections no longer exist : the mother will not pity 
the daughter in these flames, says Boston ; parents, 
says Edwards, will sing hallelujahs as they see their 
children driven into the flames where they are to lie 
" roasting " (Edwards) and " roaring " (Boston) for- 
ever. This last word, it may be remarked, has an ill 
sound on tlie lips of a theologian ; it looks as if he 
were getting out of the reach of human sympathies. 
It sounds very harshly when Cotton Mather says of a 
poor creature who was accidentally burned to death, — 
being, it seems, a little in liquor at the time, poor soul ! 
— that she " went roaring out of one fire into another." 

The true source of Edwards's Dante-like descriptions 
of his " Inferno " is but too obvious. Whatever claim 
to the character of a poet is founded on the lurid brill- 
iancy of these passages may as well be reconsidered 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 387 

in tlie red light of Thomas Boston's rhetorical autos- 
da-fe. But wherever such pictures are found, at first 
or second hand, they are sure causes of unbelief, and 
liable to produce hatred not only of those who teach 
them, but of their whole system of doctrines. " Who 
are these cruel old clerical Torquemadas," ask the un- 
godly, " who are rolling the tortures of ourselves, our 
wives and children, under their tongues like a sweet 
morsel ? " The denunciations of the pulpit came so 
near the execrations of the street in their language, 
and sometimes, it almost seemed, in their spirit, that 
many a "natural man " must have left his pew with 
the feeling in his heart embodied in a verse which the 
writer of this article found many years ago in a psalm- 
book in a Glasgow meeting-house where he was at- 
tending service, and has remembered ever since : — 

" As cursing he like clothes put on, 
Into his bowels so 
Like water, and into his bones 
Like oil down let it go." 

God forgive them ! Doubtless many of them were 
as sincere and conscientious as the most zealous of- 
ficers of the Holy Inquisition. 

The title of the " Treatise on the Religious Affec- 
tions " might naturally lead us to expect a large ex- 
pression of those tenderer feelings with which Ed- 
wards was, no doubt, naturally endowed. But in point 
of fact, if a sermon of Edwards is like a nail driven 
through a human heart, this treatise is just what 
clinches it. It is a sad thought how many souls it must 
have driven to despair. For after having equipped the 
underground laboratory of " revenging justice " with 
a complete apparatus of torture, such as to think of 
suggests nothing but insanity, he fills the unhappy be= 



388 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

liever's mind with so many doubts and scruples that 
many a pious Christian after reading it must have set 
himself down as a castaway. No warmth of feeling, 
no joy in believing, no love of religious exercises, no 
disposition to praise and glorify God, no assurance of 
faith, can be depended on as a " gracious affection; " 
for " as the Devil can counterfeit all the saving opera- 
tions and graces of the Spirit of God, so he can coun- 
terfeit those operations that are preparatory to grace," 
— in short, render every humble Christian so doubtful 
of his own state that "the peace which passeth all 
understanding" becomes a phrase without meaning. 
A discouraging statement, but not worse than Bun- 
yan's : — 

" A Christian man is never long at ease, 
When one fright 's gone, another doth him seize." 

As a general rule, we may venture to say that those 
writings of Edwards which are made up chiefly or to 
a great extent of Scriptural quotations are not very 
profitable reading. Such writings commonly deal with 
texts as the Chinese carvers do with the roots or other 
vegetable growths upon which they exercise their 
skill ; they note certain fanciful resemblances in them, 
and add whatever of their own is necessary to com- 
plete the fantastic object they are going to shape. Be- 
sides, nothing is so dangerous to intellectual virility 
as to have a so-called infallible book to fall back 
upon : it was so with the students of Aristotle, with 
those of Hippocrates and Galen ; and there is no 
sacred book in the world which has not crippled hu- 
man souls, as all who remember the Scriptural justi- 
fications of Slavery will readily admit. There is there- 
fore no need of taking up Edwards's exegetical trea- 
tises, which show him in his less robust aspect, as the 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 389 

Commentaries on the Prophecies are generally thought 
to show Sir Isaac Newton. Those who wish to learn 
what things the monstrous births arising from the 
conjunction of the sons of God with the daughters of 
men typify, — " the Church of Rome, that monstrous 
beast," among others, — those who are like to be edi- 
fied by learning that when Elisha throws the stick 
into the water to recover the sunken axe-head, the 
stick represents Christ and the iron the soul of man ; 
those who are ready to believe that the casting the 
hook and taking the first fish that came up and find- 
ing a piece of money in his mouth to be paid as trib- 
ute " signify that ministers of the gospel should re- 
ceive of the temporal things of those that they preach 
the gospel to, whose souls they catch for Christ, for 
they are the fish of which gospel-ministers are the 
fishers," — all such will do well to read Edwards's 
" Notes on the Bible." 

Such were some of the beliefs of the great divine 
who stamped his personality and his doctrines on the 
New England theology of the last century. The story 
of his outward life is a short and melancholy one. In 
1727 he was settled at Northampton as the colleague of 
his grandfather, the venerable Solomon Stoddard, who 
died in 1729. Two great revivals of religion happened 
during his ministry. Of both these he has left printed 
accounts. The work entitled " Thoughts on the Re- 
vival of Religion in New England in 1740 " is spoken 
of as having been, from the time of its first publica- 
tion, to a very wide extent the common text-book of 
evangelical divines on the subject of which it treats. 

The scenes described in his account remind one of 
the religious frenzies which seized upon multitudes in 



390 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

the Middle Ages. There are pages which look like 
the account of an epidemic, and passages almost as 
startling as one may read in Defoe's description of the 
Plague of London. Paintings, convulsions, utter pros- 
tration, trances, visions like those of delirium tre- 
mens, were common occurrences. Children went home 
from the religious meetings crying aloud through the 
streets. Some lost their reason ; not enough, Edwards 
says, to cause alarm, unless we are disposed to gather 
up all we can to darken the work and set it forth in 
frightful colors. But he perhaps goes rather too far 
in saying so much as this : " We cannot determine 
how great a calamity distraction is, considered with all 
its consequences, and all that might have been conse- 
quent if the distraction had not happened ; nor indeed 
whether, thus considered, it be any calamity at all, or 
whether it be not a mercy, by preventing some great 
sin," etc. One cannot help questioning whether a 
sense of the ludicrous did not relax his features as he 
wrote this last sentence. 

While the work was at its height a poor man, over- 
whelmed with melancholy, made an attempt to cut his 
throat. Then a gentleman of good standing, who had 
been greatly concerned about the state of his soul, but 
who " durst entertain no hope concerning his own 
good estate," succeeded in taking his life in that way. 
" After this, multitudes in this and other towns seemed 
to have it strongly suggested to them and pressed upon 
them to do as this person had done." And pious per- 
sons, who had no special darkness or doubt about the 
goodness of their state, had it urged upon them as if 
somebody had spoken to them, — " Cut your own 
throat ! Now is a good opportunity. Now ! Now ! " 

Within a very short period there was a remarkable 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 391 

change ; for in 1744 Edwards writes of the " very 
melancholy state of things in New England." " There 
is a vast alteration," he says, " within these two years. 
. . . Many high professors are fallen, some into gross 
inunoralities, some into a rooted spiritual pride, en- 
thusiasm, and an incorrigible wildness of behavior, 
some into a cold frame of mind, showing a great in- 
difference to the things of religion." But many, andj 
he hopes, the greater part of those that were professed 
converts, were genuine ones, and he hopes and is per- 
suaded that Grod will yet revive his work. 

Seven years later, writing to the Rev. Mr. Erskine, 
he says there are many instances of perseverance in 
the subjects of the late revival ; not so great a propor- 
tion, he thinks, as in Scotland. "I cannot say," he 
writes, "that the greater part of supposed converts 
give reason, by their conversation, to suppose that they 
are true converts. The proportion may perhaps be 
more truly represented by the proportion of the blos- 
soms on a tree which abide and come to mature fruit 
to the whole number of blossoms in the spring." After 
all, it is only fair to say that this is as much as could 
be claimed for the success of the sower who went forth 
to sow in the parable. 

Twenty-four years the people of Northampton lis- 
tened to the preaching of this great sermonizer, this 
mighty reasoner, this holy man. Difficulties arose be- 
tween him and his people into the consideration of 
which we need not enter. It is enough to refer to the 
delicate subject of the evil ways which had crept in to 
an alarming extent among the young people who lis- 
tened to his preaching, and the excitement caused in 
families by the fear of their exposure. But the final 



392 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

quarrel was on the question of admission of uncon- 
verted persons to the communion table, against which, 
though it had been advocated by his venerated col- 
league, he felt bound in conscience to declare himself. 

There must have been something more, one must 
believe, than these causes to account for the final vote 
v/hich separated him from his charge. For when it 
was publicly put to the people " whether they still in- 
sisted on Mr. Edwards's dismission from the pastoral 
office over them," a great majority (above two hun- 
dred against twenty) voted for his dismission. 

It is impossible that people of ordinary sensibilities 
should have listened to his torturing discourses without 
becoming at last sick of hearing of infinite horrors and 
endless agonies. It came very hard to kind-hearted 
persons to believe that the least sin exposed a creature 
God had made to such exorbitant penalties. Ed- 
wards's whole system had too much of the character 
of the savage people by whom the wilderness had so 
recently been tenanted. There was revenge — "re- 
venging justice " was what he called it — insatiable, 
exhausting its ingenuity in contriving the most ex- 
quisite torments ; there was the hereditary hatred glar- 
ing on the babe in its cradle ; there were the suffer- 
ing wretch and the pleased and shouting lookers-on. 
Every natural grace of disposition ; all that had once 
charmed in the sweet ingenuousness of youth, in the 
laughing gayety of childhood, in the winning helpless- 
ness of infancy ; every virtue that Plato had dreamed 
of, every character that Plutarch had drawn, — all 
were branded with the hot iron which left the black- 
ened inscription upon them, signifying that they were 
accursed of God, — the damning word nature. 

With all his powers, his virtues, his eloquence, it 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 393 

must have been more than people could do to stand 
being called " vile insects," " filthy worms," " fire- 
brands of hell," and other such hard names. But 
what must have been the feeling of Northampton 
mothers when they read what Edwards said about 
their darlings! It seems that there had been com- 
plaints against some preachers for frightening poor in- 
nocent children, as he says, with talk of hell-fire and 
eternal damnation. But if those who complain really 
believe what they profess to, they show, he thinks, a 
great deal of weakness and inconsideration. Then 
follow the words which the writer once quoted on a 
public occasion, which use of them brought him a let- 
ter from a much-respected orthodox clerg3raian, asking 
where they could be found. It is not strange that he 
asked, for he might have looked in vain for them in 
the ten-volume edition of Edwards's works, published 
under the editorship of his own predecessor, grandson 
of Edwards, the Reverend Sereno E. Dwight, or the 
English reprint of that edition. But the editor of the 
edition of the work on " Revivals," published in New 
York in 1832, did not think it necessary, perhaps 
honest, to omit the passage, and this is the way it 
reads : — 

" As innocent as children seem to be to us, yet, if they are out 
of Christ, they are not so in God 's sight, but are young vipers, 
and are uifinitely more hateful than vipers, and are in a most mis- 
erable condition, as well as grown persons ; and they are naturally 
very senseless and stupid, being horn as the wild ass's colt, and 
need much to awaken them." 

Is it possible that Edwards read the text mothers 
love so well, " Suffer little vipers to come unto me, 
and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of 
God"? 



394 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

The truth is, Edwards belonged in Scotland, to 
which he owed so much, and not to New England. 
And the best thing that could have happened, if it had 
happened early enough, both for him and for his peo- 
ple, was what did happen after a few years of resi- 
dence at Stockbridge, where he went after leaving 
Northampton, — namely, his transfer to the presidency 
of the college at Princeton, New Jersey, where the 
Scotch theological thistle has always flourished, native 
or imported, — a stately flower at present, with fewer 
prickles and livelier bloom than in the days of Thomas 
Boston, the Ettrick shepherd of old. Here he died 
before assuming the duties of his office ; died in faith 
and hope, — hope for himself, at any rate, perhaps, as 
we shall see, with less despairing views for the future 
of his fellow-creatures than his printed works have 
shown us. 

The reader may have patience left for a few gen- 
eral remarks. 

The spiritual nature seems to be a natural endow- 
ment, like a musical ear. Those who have no ear for 
music must be very careful how they speak about that 
mysterious world of thrilling vibrations which are idle 
noises to them. And so the true saint can be entirely 
appreciated only by saintly natures. Yet the least 
spiritual man can hardly read those remarkable " Res- 
olutions " of Edwards without a reverence akin to awe 
for his purity and elevation. His beliefs and his con- 
duct we need not hesitate to handle freely. We have 
lately seen unquestioning and unquestioned " faith" 
ending in child-murder. The spiritual nature is no 
safeguard against error of doctrine or practice ; in- 
deed, it may be doubted whether a majority of all the 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 395 

spiritual natures in tlie world would be found in Chris- 
tian countries. 

Edwards's system seems, in the light of to-day, to 
the last degree barbaric, mechanical, materialistic, pes- 
simistic. If he had lived a hundred years later, and 
breathed the air of freedom, he could not have written 
with such old-world barbarism as we find in his vol- 
canic sermons. We can realize in our day the truth 
of Montesquieu's saying, " If the punishments of the 
Orientals horrify humanity, the reason is that the des- 
pot who ordains them is above all laws. It is not so 
in republics, wherein the laws are always mild, be- 
cause he who makes them is himself a subject." We 
cannot have self-government and humane laws without 
its reacting on our view of the Divine administration. 
It was not so strange that Thomas Boston, from whose 
livid pages Edwards derived much of his inspiration, 
should put his hearers on the rack of his depraved im- 
agination, for he could remember the days when tor- 
ture was used in Scotland to extract evidence. He 
may have heard the story told in his nursery, — for 
he was a boy six years old at the time, — how they 
had been applying the thumb-screws for an hour and 
a half to Principal William Carstairs, at Holyrood 
Palace, under the direction of the Privy Council. 

Again, what can be more mechanical than the God 
of all gods he contrived, — or accepted, — under the 
name of Justice^ — a piece of iron machinery which 
would have held back the father's arms stretching out 
to embrace his son, and shed the blood of the prodigal, 
instead of that of the fatted caK ? 

What can be more utterly materialistic than to at- 
tach the idea of sinfulness and responsibility, and lia- 
bility to eternal suffering in consequence, to a little 



396 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

organic bundle, with no more knowledge of its rela- 
tions to the moral world than a marsupial embryo in 
the maternal pouch has of its geographical position ? 

And what pessimism that ever entered the mind of 
man has gone farther than that which taxed the im- 
agination to the utmost for its horrors, and declared 
that these were but the faintest image of what was re- 
served for the bulk of mankind ? 

There is reason to fear that Edwards has not been 
fairly dealt with in all respects. We have seen that 
in one instance expressions, which it was probably 
thought would give offence, were omitted by his editor. 
A far more important matter remains to be cleared 
up. The writer is informed on unquestionable author- 
ity that there is or was in existence a manuscript of Ed- 
wards in which his views appear to have undergone a 
great change in the direction of Arianism, or of Sabel- 
lianism, which is an old-fashioned Unit arianism, or at 
any rate show a defection from his former standard of 
orthodoxy, and which its custodians, thinking it best 
to be wise as serpents in order that they might con- 
tinue harmless as doves, have considered it their duty 
to withhold from the public. If any of our friends at 
Andover can inform us what are the facts about this 
manuscript, such information would be gratefully re- 
ceived by many inquirers, who would be rejoiced to 
know that so able and so good a man lived to be eman- 
cipated from the worse than heathen conceptions which 
had so long enchained his powerful, but crippled un- 
derstanding. 

Much that was morbid in Edwards's theology was 
doubtless owing to ill health, from which he was an 
habitual sufferer, a melancholic temperament, and the 
habifc of constant moral introspection, of which his 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 397 

diary gives abundant evidence. Mr. Galton, in his 
work on " Heredity," says, after having looked up 
the history of a good many clergymen : "A gently 
complaining and fatigued spirit is that in which evan- 
gelical divines are very apt to pass their days. . . . 
There is an air of invalidism about most religious 
biographies." And Taine, in his notice of the poet 
Cowper, speaks of " the profound dejection, gloomy 
and continued despair, the horrible malady of the 
nerves and the soul which leads to suicide, Puritanism^ 
and madness." 

Perpetual self-inspection leads to spiritual hypo- 
chondriasis. If a man insists on counting his pulse 
twenty times a day, on looking at his tongue every 
hour or two, on taking his temperature with the ther- 
mometer morning and evening, on weighing himseK 
three or four times a week, he will soon find himself 
in a doubtful state of bodily health. It is just so with 
those who are perpetually counting their spiritual 
pulse, taking the temperature of their feelings, weigh- 
ing their human and necessarily imperfect characters 
against the infinite perfections placed in the other 
scale of the balance. 

These melancholy diarists remind one of children 
in their little gardens, planting a bean or a lupine- 
seed in the morning, and pulling it up in the evening 
to see if it has sprouted or how it is getting on. The 
diarist pulls his character up by the roots every even- 
ing, and finds the soil of human nature, — the humus, 
— out of which it must needs grow, clinging to its 
radicles. Then he mourns over himseK as did the 
saintly Brainard as " inexpressibly loathsome and de- 
filed," calling himself so vile " that [he] dared not look 
anybody in the face," and soon becomes a fit subject 



398 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

for medical treatment, having lost all wholesome sense 
of the world about him and of his own personality. 

Jeremy Taylor has well said of godly fear : " But 
this so excellent grace is soon abused in the best and 
most tender spirits ; in those who are softened by na- 
ture and religion, by infelicities or cares, by sudden ac- 
cidents or a sad soul ; and the Devil, observing that 
fear, like spare diet, starves the fevers of lust and 
quenches the flames of hell, endeavors to heighten this 
abstinence so much as to starve the man, and break 
the spirit into timorousness and scruple, sadness and 
unreasonable tremblings, credulity and trifling obser- 
vation, suspicion and false accusations of God." 

The fact that, while Edwards's name is used as a 
war-cry, and inscribed on the labarum of the old bow- 
and-arrow controversialists, his works are neglected, 
his doctrines either passed over in silence or repudi- 
ated, shows that his great powers were under some mis- 
guiding influence. The truth is that the whole system 
of beliefs which came in with the story of the " fall of 
man," the curse of the father of the race conveyed by 
natural descent to his posterity, the casting of the re- 
sponsibility of death and all the disorders of creation 
upon the unfortunate being who found them a part of 
the arrangements of the universe when he first made 
his appearance, is gently fading out of enlightened hu- 
man intelligence, and we are hardly in a condition to re- 
alize what a tyranny it once exerted over many of the 
strongest minds. We no longer pretend to hold our 
primeval ancestor, whoever he may have been, respon- 
sible for the entrance of death into the world, for the 
teeth of the carnivora, for the venom of the snake, foi 
the battles of the megatherium, the maladies of the 
ichthyosaurus, the indispositions of the pterodactyl, the 



JONATHAN EDWAEDS. 399 

extinction of the strange creatures that left their foot- 
prints on the shores of the Connecticut, where we have 
been finding the tracks of a fossil theology not less 
monstrous than its predecessors in the material world. 
Astronomy, Geology, Ethnology, and the comparative 
study of Oriental religions have opened the way ; and 
now Anthropology has taken hold of the matter, and, 
leaving aside all those questions which by searching no 
man can find out, must deal with the problem which 
Asiatic tradition and its interpreters have fitiled to 
solve. But in the mean time many lessons are to be 
learned from the careful study of a man, who, as Mr. 
Bancroft says, " sums up the old theology of New Eng- 
land and is the fountain-head of the new." What bet- 
ter comment can be made on his misdirected powers 
than his own remark : "A person may have a strong 
reason and yet not a good reason. He may have a 
strength of mind to drive an argument and yet not 
have even balances." 

As we picture the scenes he described, the Divine 
ingenuity fitting the body and soul for the extremity 
of suffering, and providing new physical and chemical 
laws to carry torture beyond our power of imagination, 
friends looking on pleased, parents rejoicing and sing- 
ing hallelujahs as they see their children " turned away 
and beginning to enter into the great furnace " v/here 
they are to " roast " forever, all natural affections ut= 
terly gone, — can we find anywhere a more striking il= 
lustration of his own words ? He is speaking of the 
self -torturing worship of the heathen : " How power- 
ful must be the delusions of the human mind, and how 
strong the tendency of the heart to carry them such a 
length and so to overcome the tenderest feelings of hu- 
man nature ! " 



400 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

There is no sufficient reason for attacking the mo- 
lives of a man so saintly in life, so holy in aspirations, 
so patient, so meek, so laborious, so thoroughly in ear- 
nest in the work to which his life was given. But 
after long smothering in the sulphurous atmosphere of 
his thought one cannot help asking, Was this or any- 
thing like this, — is this or anything like this, - — the 
accepted belief of any considerable part of Protestant- 
ism ? If so, we must say with Bacon, " It were bet- 
ter to have no opinion of God at all than such an 
opinion as is unworthy of Him." A " natural man " 
is better than an unnatural theologian. It is a less 
violence to our nature to deify protoplasm than it is to 
diabolize the Deity. 

The practical effect of Edwards's teachings about 
the relations of God and man has bequeathed a les- 
son not to be forgotten. A revival in which the ma- 
jority of the converts fell away ; nervous disorders of 
all sorts, insanity, suicide, among the rewards of his 
eloquence ; Religion dressed up in fine phrases and 
made much of, while Morality, her Poor Relation, was 
getting hard treatment at the hands of the young per- 
sons who had grown up under the reign of terror of 
the Northampton pulpit; alienation of the hearts of 
his people to such an extent as is rarely seen in the 
bitterest quarrels between pastor and flock, — if this 
was a successful ministry, what disasters would con- 
stitute a failure ? 

"Never," says Professor Fisher, "was there a louder 
call for the utmost candor and fairness in dealing 
with the difficulties and objections of inquiring minds, 
whose perplexities find little relief in much of the cur- 
rent and traditional teaching." 



JONATHAN EDWARDS. 401 

At the bottom of these difficulties lies the doctrine 
of the " fall of man." Does not the present state of 
our knowledge compel us to consider the narrative on 
which this is based as a disproved, or at the best an 
unproved story, and to consign it, with the cohering 
doctrine of sin and all other inferences dependent 
upon it, to the nebulous realm of Asiatic legends, the 
vehicles of many different religions, each with its min- 
gled truths and errors ? The change of opinion is com- 
ing quite rapidly enough : we should hardly dare to 
print our doubts and questions if we did not know 
that they will be read by few, made light of by some 
of these, summarily answered and dismissed by others, 
and have no apparent immediate effect on the great 
mass of beliefs. For what we want in the religious 
and in the political organisms is just that kind of vital 
change which takes place in our bodies, — interstitial 
disintegration and reintegration; and one of the legit- 
imate fears of our time is that science, which Sainte- 
Beuve would have us think has destroyed faith, will 
be too rapid in its action on beliefs. So the doubter 
should be glad that he is doubted ; the rationalist 
respect the obduracy of the dogmatist ; and all the 
mighty explosives with which the growth of knowledge 
has furnished us should be used rather to clear the 
path for thost who come after us than to shatter the 
roofs which have long protected and still protect so 
many of our humble and trusting f ellow-creatureSo 



xn. 

THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 

The priest is dead for the Protestant world. Jju- 
tiler's inkstand did not kill the devil, but it killed the 
priest, at least for us. He is a loss in many respects 
to be regretted. He kept alive the spirit of reverence. 
He was looked up to as possessing qualities superhu- 
man in their nature, and so was competent to be the 
stay of the weak and their defence against the strong. 
If one end of religion is to make men happier in this 
world as well as in the next, mankind lost a great 
source of happiness when the priest was reduced to the 
common level of humanity, and became only a minis- 
ter. Priest, which was presbyter^ corresponded to 
senator, and was a title to respect and honor. Minis- 
ter is but the diminutive of magister^ and implies an 
obligation to render service. 

It was promised to the first preachers that in proof 
of their divine mission they should have the power of 
casting out devils and talking in strange tongues ; that 
they should handle serpents and drink poisons with 
impunity ; that they should lay hands on the sick and 
they should recover. The Roman Church claims some 
of these powers for its clergy and its sacred objects 
to this day. Miracles, it is professed, are wrought by 
them, or through them, as in the days of the apostles. 
Protestantism proclaims that the age of such occur- 
rences as the apostles witnessed is past. What does 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 403 

it know about miracles ? It knows a great many rec- 
ords of miracles, but this is a different kind of knowl- 
edge. 

The minister may be revered for his character, fol= 
lowed for his eloquence, admired for his learning, 
loved for his amiable qualities, but he can never be 
what the priest was in past ages, and is still, in the 
Roman Church. Dr. Arnold's definition may be found 
fault with, but it has a very real meaning. " The es- 
sential point in the notion of a priest is this : that he 
is a person made necessary to our intercourse with 
God, without being necessary or beneficial to us mor- 
ally, — an unreasonable, unmoral, spiritual necessity." 
He did not mean, of course, that the priest might not 
have all the qualities which would recommend him as 
a teacher or as a man, but that he had a special power, 
quite independent of his personal character, which could 
act, as it were, mechanically ; that out of him went a 
virtue, as from the hem of his Master's raiment, to 
those with whom his sacred office brought him in con- 
tact. 

It was a great comfort to poor helpless human be- 
ings to have a tangible personality of like nature with 
themselves as a mediator between them and the heav- 
enly powers. Sympathy can do much for the sorrow- 
ing, the suffering, the dying, but to hear God himself 
speaking directly through human lips, to feel the touch 
of a hand which is the channel of communication with 
the unseen Omnipotent, this was and is the privilege 
of those who looked and those who still look up to a 
priesthood. It has been said, and many who have 
walked the hospitals or served in the dispensaries can 
bear witness to the truth of the assertion, that the 
Koman Catholics know how to die. The same thing is 



404 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

less confidently to be said of Protestants. How fre- 
quently is the story told of the most exemplary Prot- 
estant Christians, nay, how common is it to read in the 
lives of the most exemplary Protestant ministers, that 
they were beset with doubts and terrors in their last 
days ! The blessing of the viaticum is unknown to 
them. Man is essentially an idolater, — that is, in 
bondage to his imagination, — for there is no more 
harm in the Greek word eidolon than in the Latin 
word imago. He wants a visible image to fix his 
thought, a scarabee or a crux ansata^ or the modern 
symbols which are to our own time what these were to 
the ancient Egyptians. He wants a vicegerent of the 
Almighty to take his dying hand and bid him god- 
speed on his last journey. Who but such an imme- 
diate representative of the Divinity would have dared 
to say to the monarch just laying his head on the 
block, " I^ils de Saint Louis^ monte au del " f 

It has been a long and gradual process to thoroughly 
republicanize the American Protestant descendant of 
the ancient priesthood. The history of the Congrega- 
tionalists in New England would show us how this 
change has gone on, until we have seen the church be- 
come a hall open to all sorts of purposes, the pulpit 
come down to the level of the rostrum, and the clergy- 
man take on the character of a popular lecturer who 
deals with every kind of subject, including religion. 

Whatever fault we may find with many of their be- 
liefs, we have a right to be proud of our Pilgrim and 
Puritan fathers among the clergy. They were ready 
to do and to suffer anything for their faith, and a faith 
which breeds heroes is better than an unbelief which 
leaves nothing worth being a hero for. Only let us be 
fair, and not defend the creed of Mohammed because 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 405 

it nurtured brave men and enlightened scholars, or re- 
frain from condemning polygamy in our admiration of 
the indomitable spirit and perseverance of the Pilgrim 
Fathers of Mormonism, or justify an inhuman belief, 
or a cruel or foolish superstition, because it was once 
held or acquiesced in by men whose nobility of char- 
acter we heartily recognize. The New England clergy 
can look back to a noble record, but the pulpit has 
sometimes required a homily from the pew, and may 
sometimes find it worth its wliile to listen to one even 
in our own days. 

From the settlement of the country to the present 
time, the ministers have furnished the highest type of 
character to the people among whom they have lived. 
They have lost to a considerable extent the position of 
leaders, but if they are in our times rather to be looked 
upon as representatives of their congregations, they 
represent what is best among those of whom they are 
the speaking organs. We have a right to expect them 
to be models as well as teachers of all that makes the 
best citizens for this world and the next, and they 
have not been, and are not in these later days un- 
worthy of their high calling. They have worked hard 
for small earthly compensation. They have been the 
most learned men the country had to show, when 
learning was a scarce commodity. Called by their 
consciences to self-denying labors, living simply, often 
half-supported by the toil of their own hands, they 
have let the light, such light as shone for them, into 
the minds of our communities as the settler's axe let 
the sunshine into their log-huts and farm-houses. 

Their work has not been confined to their profes- 
sional duties, as a few instances will illustrate. Often, 
as was just said, they toiled like day-laborers, teasing 



406 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

lean harvests out of their small inclosures of land, ^ 
for the New England soil is not one that " laughs when 
tickled with a hoe," but rather one that sulks when 
appealed to with that persuasive implement. The 
father of the eminent Boston physician whose recent 
loss is so deeply regretted, the Reverend Pitt Clarke, 
forty-two years pastor of the small fold in the town of 
Norton, Massachusetts, was a typical example of this 
union of the two callings, and it would be hard to find 
a story of a more wholesome and useful life, within a 
limited and isolated circle, than that which the pious 
care of one of his children commemorated. Sometimes 
the New England minister, like worthy Mr. Ward of 
Stratford-on-Avon, in old England, joined the prac- 
tice of medicine to the offices of his holy profession. 
Michael Wigglesworth, the poet of "The Day of 
Doom," and Charles Chauncy, the second president of 
Harvard College, were instances of this twofold service. 
In politics their influence has always been felt, and in 
many cases their drums ecclesiastic have beaten the 
reveille as vigorously, and to as good purpose, as it 
ever sounded in the slumbering camp. Samuel Cooper 
sat in council with the leaders of the Revolution in 
Boston. The three Northampton-born brothers Allen, 
Thomas, Moses, and Solomon, lifted their voices, and, 
when needed, their armed hands, in the cause of lib- 
erty. In later days, Elijah Parish and David Osgood 
carried politics into their pulpits as boldly as their 
antislavery successors have done in times still more re= 
cent. 

The learning, the personal character, the sacredness 
of their office, tended to give the New England clergy 
of past generations a kind of aristocratic dignity, a 
personal grandeur, much more felt in the days when 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 407 

class distinctions were recognized less unwillingly than 
at present. Their costume added to the effect of their 
bodily presence, as the old portraits illustrate for us, 
as those of us who remember the last of the "fair, 
white, curly " wigs, as it graced the imposing figure of 
the Reverend Dr. Marsh of Wethersfield, Connecticut, 
can testify. They were not only learned in the history 
of the past, but they were the interpreters of the proph- 
ecy, and announced coming events with a confidence 
equal to that with which the weather-bureau warns us 
of a coming storm. The numbers of the book of Dan- 
iel and the visions of the Revelation were not too hard 
for them. In the commonplace book of the Reverend 
Joel Benedict is to be found the following record, 
made, as it appears, about the year 1773 : " Convers- 
ing with Dr. Bellamy upon the downfall of Antichiist, 
after many things had been said upon the subject, the 
Doctor began to warm, and uttered himself after this 
manner : ' Tell your children to tell their children that 
in the year 1866 something notable will happen in the 
church ; tell them the old man says so.' " 

" The old man " came pretty near hitting the mark, 
as we shall see if we consider what took place in the 
decade from 1860 to 1870. In 1864 the Pope issued 
the " Syllabus of Errors," which " must be considered 
by Romanists as an infallible official document, and 
which arrays the papacy in open war against modern 
civilization and civil and religious freedom." The Vat- 
ican Council in 1870 declared the Pope to be the 
bishop of bishops, and immediately after this began 
the decisive movement of the party known as the " Old 
Catholics." In the exact year looked forward to by 
the New England prophet, 1866, the evacuation of 
Rome by the French and the publication of "Ecce 



408 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

Homo " appear to be the most remarkable events hav- 
ing special relation to the religious world. Perhaps 
the National Council of the Congregationalists, held 
at Boston in 1865, may be reckoned as one of the 
occurrences which the oracle just missed. 

The confidence, if not the spirit of prophecy, lasted 
down to a later period. "In half a century," said 
the venerable Dr. Porter of Conway, New Hamp- 
shire, in 1822, "there will be no Pagans, Jews, Mo- 
hammedans, Unitarians, or Methodists." The half- 
century has more than elapsed, and the prediction 
seems to stand in need of an extension, like many 
other prophetic utterances. 

The story is told of David Osgood, the shaggy- 
browed old minister of Medf ord, that he had expressed 
his belief that not more than one soul in two thousand 
would be saved. Seeing a knot of his parishioners in 
debate, he asked them what they were discussing, and 
was told that they were questioning which of the Med- 
ford people was the elected one, the population being 
just two thousand, and that opinion was divided whether 
it would be the minister or one of his deacons. The 
story may or may not be literally true, but it illus- 
trates the popular belief of those days, that the cler- 
gyman saw a good deal farther into the councils of 
the Almighty than his successors could claim the power 
of doing. 

The objects about me, as I am writing, call to mind 
the varied accomplishments of some of the New Eng- 
land clergy. The face of the Revolutionary preacher, 
Samuel Cooper, as Copley painted it, looks upon me 
with the pleasantest of smiles and a liveliness of ex- 
pression which makes him seem a contemporary after a 
hundred years' experience of eternity. The Plato on 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 409 

this lower shelf bears tlie inscription : " Ezrm Stiles, 
1766. Olim e lihris Rev. Jaredis Eliot de Killing- 
worth.'^'' Both were noted scholars and philosophers. 
The hand-lens before me was imported, with other phil- 
osophical instruments, by the Reverend John Prince 
of Salem, an earlier student of science in the town 
since distinguished by the labors of the Essex Insti- 
tute. Jeremy Belknap holds an honored place in that 
unpretending row of local historians. And in the 
pages of his " History of New Hampshire " may be 
found a chapter contributed in part by the most re- 
markable man, in many respects, among all the older 
clergymen — preacher, lawyer, physician, astronomer, 
botanist, entomologist, explorer, colonist, legislator in 
state and national governments, and only not seated 
on the bench of the Supreme Court of a Territory 
because he declined the office when Washington of- 
fered it to him. This manifold individual was the 
minister of Hamilton, a pleasant little town in Essex 
County, Massachusetts, — the Reverend Manasseh 
Cutler. These reminiscences from surrounding objects 
came up unexpectedly, of themselves, and have a right 
here, as showing how wide is the range of intelligence 
in the clerical body thus accidentally represented in a 
single library making no special pretensions. 

It is not so exalted a claim to make for them, but 
it may be added that they were often the wits and 
humorists of their localities. Mather Byles's facetiae 
are among the colonial classic reminiscenceSo But 
these were, for the most part, verbal quips and quib- 
bles. True humor is an outgrowth of character. It 
is never found in greater perfection than in old clergy- 
men and old college professors. Dr. Sprague's "An- 
nals of the American Pulpit '* tells many stories of 



410 PAGES FEOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

our old ministers as good as Dean Ramsay's " Scot* 
tish Reminiscences." He has not recorded tlie fol- 
lowing, which is to be found in Miss Larned's excel- 
lent and most interesting History of Windham County, 
Connecticut. The Reverend Josiah Dwight was the 
minister of Woodstock, Connecticut, about the year 
1700. He was not old, it is true, but he must have 
caught the ways of the old ministers. The " sensa- 
tional " pulpit of our own time could hardly surpass 
him in the drollery of its expressions. A specimen or 
two may dispose the reader to turn over the pages 
which follow in a good-natured frame of mind. " If 
unconverted men ever got to heaven," he said, " they 
would feel as uneasy as a shad up the crotch of a 
white-oak." Some of his ministerial associates took 
offence at his eccentricities, and called on a visit of 
admonition to the offending clergyman. " Mr. Dwight 
received their reproofs with great meekness, frankly 
acknowledged his faults, and promised amendment, 
but, in prayer at parting, after returning thanks for 
the brotherly visit and admonition, ' hoped that they 
might so hitch their horses on earth that they should 
never kick in the stables of everlasting salvation.' " 

It is a good thing to have some of the blood of one 
of these old ministers in one's veins. An English 
bishop proclaimed the fact before an assembly of phy- 
sicians the other day that he was not ashamed to say 
that he had a son who was a doctor. Yery kind that 
was in the bishop, and very proud his medical audience 
must have felt. Perhaps he was not ashamed of the 
Gospel of Luke, " the beloved physician," or even of 
the teachings which came from the lips of one who 
was a carpenter, and the son of a carpenter. So a 
New-Englander, even if he were a bishop, need not be 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 411 

ashamed to say that he consented to have an ancestor 
who was a mmister. On the contrary, he has a right 
to be grateful for a probable inheritance of good in- 
stincts, a good name, and a bringing up in a library 
where he bumped about among books from the time 
when he was hardly taller than one of his father's or 
grandfather's folios. What are the names of minis- 
ters' sons which most readily occur to our memory as 
illustrating these advantages? Edward Everett, Jo- 
seph Stevens Buckminster, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 
George Bancroft, Richard Hildreth, James Russell 
Lowell, Francis Parkman, Charles Eliot Norton, were 
all ministers' boys. John Lothrop Motley was the 
grandson of the clergyman after whom he was named. 
George Ticknor was next door to such a descent, for his 
father was a deacon. This is a group which it did not 
take a long or a wide search to bring together. 

Men such as the ministers who have been described 
could not fail to exercise a good deal of authority in 
the communities to which they belonged. The effect 
of the Revolution must have been to create a tendency 
to rebel against spiritual dictation. Republicanism 
levels in religion as in everything. It might have been 
expected, therefore, that soon after civil liberty had 
been established there would be conflicts between the 
traditional authority of the minister and the claims of 
the now free and independent congregation. So it 
was, in fact, as for instance in the case which follows, 
for which the reader is indebted to Miss Larned's 
book, before cited. 

The ministerial veto allowed by the Saybrook Plat- 
form gave rise, in the year 1792, to a fierce conflict in 
the town of Pomfret, Connecticut. Zephaniah Swift, 
a lawyer of Windham, came out in the Windham 



412 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

" Herald," in all the vehemence of partisan phraseol- 
ogy, with all the emphasis of italics and small capitals. 
Was it not time, he said, for people to look about 
them and see whether " such despotism was founded 
in Scripture^ in reason^ in policy^ or on the rights oj 
man I A minister, by his vote^ by his single voice, 
may negative the unanimous vote of the church ! Are 
ministers composed of finer clay than the rest of man- 
kind, that entitles them to this preeminence ? Does a 
license to preach transform a man into a higher orjier 
of beings and endow him with a natural quality to gov- 
ern? Are the laity an inferior order of beings, fit 
only to be slaves and to be governed f Is it good 
policy for mankind to subject themselves to such de- 
grading vassalage and abject submission f Reason, 
common sense, and the Bible, with united voice, pro- 
claim to all mankind that they are all born free and 
equal ; that every member of a church or Christian 
congregation must be on the same footing in respect 
of church government, and that the Constitution, 
which delegates to one the power to negative the vote 
of all the rest, IS subversive of the natural right 
of mankind and repugnant to the word of 
God." 

The Eeverend Mr. Welch replied to the lawyer's 
attack, pronouncing him to be " destitute of delicacy, 
decency, good manners, sound judgment, honesty, 
manhood, and humanity ; a poltroon, a cat's-paw, the 
infamous tool of a party, a partisan, a political weath- 
er-cock, and a ragamuffin." 

No Fourth -of -July orator would in our day rant 
like the lawyer, and no clergyman would use such lan- 
guage as that of the Reverend Moses Welch. The 
clergy have been pretty well republicanized within the 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 413 

last two or three generations, and are not likely to pro- 
voke quarrels by assertion of their special dignities or 
privileges. The public is better bred than to carry on 
an ecclesiastical controversy in terms which political 
brawlers would hardly think admissible. The min- 
ister of religion is generally treated with something 
more than respect ; he is allowed to say undisputed 
what would be sharply controverted in anybody else. 
Bishop Gilbert Haven, of happy memory, had been 
discussing a religious subject with a friend who was 
not convinced by his arguments. " Wait till you hear 
me from the pulpit," he said ; " there you cannot an- 
swer me." The preacher — if I may use an image 
which would hardly have suggested itself to him — has 
his hearer's head in chancery, and can administer pun- 
ishment ad libitum. False facts, false reasoning, bad 
rhetoric, bad grammar, stale images, borrowed pas- 
sages, if not borrowed sermons, are listened to with- 
out a word of comment or a look of disapprobation. 

One of the ablest and most conscientiously labori- 
ous of our clergymen has lately ventured to question 
whether all his professional brethren invariably give 
utterance to their sincerest beliefs, and has been 
sharply criticised for so doing. The layman, who sits 
silent in his pew, has his rights when out of it, and 
among them is the right of questioning that which has 
been addressed to him from the privileged eminence 
of the pulpit, or in any way sanctioned by his religious 
teacher. It is nearly two hundred years since a Bos- 
ton layman wrote these words : " I am not ignorant that 
the pious frauds of the ancient, and the inbred fire (I 
do not call it pride) of many of our modern divines, 
have precipitated them to propagate and maintain truth 
as well as falsehoods, in such an unfair manner as 



414 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

has given advantage to the enemy to suspect the whole 
doctrine these men have profest to be nothing but a 
mere trick." 

So wrote Robert Calef, the Boston merchant, whose 
book the Reverend Increase Mather, president of Har- 
vard College, burned publicly in the college yard. But 
the pity of it is that the layman had not cried out ear- 
lier and louder, and saved the community from the 
horror of those judicial murders for witchcraft, the 
blame of which was so largely attributable to the clergy. 

Perhaps no laymen have given the clergy more 
trouble than the doctors. The old reproach against 
physicians, that where there were three of them to- 
gether there were two atheists, had a real significance, 
but not that which was intended by the sharp-tongued 
ecclesiastic who first uttered it. Undoubtedly there 
is a strong tendency in the pursuits of the medical pro- 
fession to produce disbelief in that figment of tradition 
and diseased human imagination which has been in- 
stalled in the seat of divinity by the priesthood of 
cruel and ignorant ages. It is impossible, or at least 
very difficult, for a physician who has seen the perpet- 
ual efforts of Nature — whose diary is the book he 
reads oftenest — to heal wounds, to expel poisons, to 
do the best that can be done under the given condi- 
tions, — it is very difficult for him to believe in a 
world where wounds cannot heal, where opiates cannot 
give a respite from pain, where sleep never comes with 
its sweet oblivion of suffering, where the art of torture 
is the only science cultivated, and the capacity for be- 
ing tormented is the only faculty which remains to the 
children of that same Father who cares for the falling 
sparrow. The Deity has often been pictured as Mo- 
loch, and the physician has, no doubt, frequently repu- 
diated him as a monstrosity. 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 415 

On the other hand, the physician has often been re- 
nowned for piety as well as for his peculiarly profes- 
sional virtue of charity, — led upward by what he sees 
to the source of all the daily marvels wrought before 
his own eyes. So it was that Galen gave utterance to 
that psalm of praise which the sweet singer of Israel 
need not have been ashamed of; and if this "heathen" 
could be lifted into such a strain of devotion, we need 
not be surprised to find so many devout Christian 
worshippers among the crowd of medical " atheists." 

No two professions should come into such intimate 
and cordial relations as those to which belong the heal- 
ers of the body and the healers of the mind. There can 
be no more fatal mistake than that which brings them 
into hostile attitudes with reference to each other, both 
having in view the welfare of their fellow-creatures. 
But there is a territory always liable to be differed 
about between them. There are patients who never 
tell their physician the grief which lies at the bottom 
of their ailments. He goes through his accustomed 
routine with them, and thinks he has all the elements 
needed for his diagnosis. But he has seen no deeper 
into the breast than the tongue, and got no nearer the 
heart than the wrist. A wise and experienced clergy- 
man, coming to the patient's bedside, — not with the 
professional look on his face which suggests the under- 
taker and the sexton, but with a serene countenance 
and a sympathetic voice, with tact, with patience, wait- 
ing for the right moment, — will surprise the shy spirit 
into a confession of the doubt, the sorrow, the shame, 
the remorse, the terror which underlies all the bodily 
symptoms, and the unburdening of which into a lov- 
ing and pitying soul is a more potent anodyne than all 
the drowsy sirups of the world. And, on the other 



416 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

Land, there are many nervous and over-sensitive na- 
tures which have been wrought up by self - torturing 
spiritual exercises until their best confessor would be 
a sagacious and wholesome-minded physician. 

Suppose a person to have become so excited by relig- 
ious stimulants that he is subject to what are known 
to the records of insanity as hallucinations : that he 
hears voices whispering blasphemy in his ears, and 
sees devils coming to meet him, and thinks he is going 
to be torn in pieces, or trodden into the mire. Suppose 
that his mental conflicts, after plunging him into the 
depths of despondency, at last reduce him to a state of 
despair^ so that he now contemplates taking his own 
life, and debates with himself whether it shall be by 
knife, halter, or poison, and after much questioning is 
apparently making up his mind to commit suicide. Is 
not this a manifest case of insanity, in the form known 
as melancholia f Woidd not any prudent physician 
keep such a person under the eye of constant watch- 
ers, as in a dangerous state of, at least, partial mental 
alienation? Yet this is an exact- transcript of the 
mental condition of Christian in " Pilgrim's Progress," 
audits counterpart has been found in thousands of 
wretched lives terminated by the act of self-destruc- 
tion, which came so near taking place in the hero of 
the allegory. Now the wonderful book from which this 
example is taken is, next to the Bible and the Trea- 
tise of " De Imitatione Christi," the best-known relig- 
ious work of Christendom. If Bunyan and his con- 
temporary, Sydenham, had met in consultation over 
the case of Christian at the time when he was medi- 
tating self-murder, it is very possible that there might 
have been a difference of judgment. The physician 
would have one advantage in such a consultation. He 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 417 

would pretty certainly have received a Christian edu- 
cation, while the clergyman would probably know next 
to nothing of the laws or manifestations of mental or 
bodily disease. It does not seem as if any theological 
student was really prepared for his practical duties un= 
til he had learned something of the effects of bodily 
derangements, and, above all, had become familiar with 
the gamut of mental discord in the wards of an insane 
asylum. 

It is a very thoughtless thing to say that the physi- 
cian stands to the divine in the same light as the di- 
vine stands to the physician, so far as each may at- 
tempt to handle subjects belonging especially to the 
other's profession. Many physicians know a great deal 
more about religious matters than they do about medi- 
cine. They have read the Bible ten times as much as 
they ever read any medical author. They have heard 
scores of sermons for one medical lecture to which 
they have listened. They often hear much better 
preaching than the average minister, for he hears him- 
self chiefly, and they hear abler men and a variety of 
them. They have now and then been distinguished in 
theology as well as in their own profession. The name 
of Servetus might call up unpleasant recollections, but 
that of another medical practitioner may be safely 
mentioned. "It was not till the middle of the last 
century that the question as to the authorship of the 
Pentateuch was handled with anything like a discern- 
ing criticism. The first attempt was made by a lay- 
man, whose studies we might have supposed would 
scarcely have led him to such an investigation." This 
layman was " Astruc, doctor and professor of medicine 
in the Royal College at Paris, and court physician to 
Louis XIV." The quotation is from the article " Pen- 



418 PAGES FKOM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. '' 

tateuch" in Smith's " Dictionary of the Bible, " which, 
of course, lies on the table of the least instructed 
clergyman. The sacred profession has, it is true, re- 
turned the favor by giving the practitioner of medicine 
Bishop Berkeley's "Treatise on Tar-water," and the 
invaluable prescription of that " aged clergyman whose 

sands of life " but let us be fair, if not generous, 

and remember that Cotton Mather shares with Zabdiel 
Boylston the credit of introducing the practice of in- 
oculation into America. The professions should be 
cordial allies, but the church-going, Bible-reading phj^- 
sician ought to know a great deal more of the subjects 
included under the general name of theology than the 
clergyman can be expected to know of medicine. To 
say, as has been said not long since, that a young divin- 
ity student is as competent to deal with the latter as 
an old physician is to meddle with the former, sug- 
gests the idea that wisdom is not an heirloom in the 
family of the one who says it. What a set of idiots 
our clerical teachers must have been and be, if, after a 
quarter or half a century of their instruction, a person 
of fair intelligence is utterly incompetent to form any 
opinion about the subjects which they have been teach- 
ing, or trying to teach him, so long ! 

A minister must find it very hard work to preach to 
hearers who do not believe, or only half believe, what 
he preaches. But pews without heads in them are a 
still more depressing spectacle. He may convince the 
doubter and reform the profligate. But he cannot 
produce any change on pine and mahogany by his dis- 
courses, and the more wood he sees as he looks along 
his floor and galleries, the less his chance of being use- 
ful. It is natural that in times like the present changes 
of faith and of place of worship should be far from in- 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 419 

frequent. It is not less natural that there should be 
regrets on one side and gratification on the other, when 
such changes occur. It even happens occasionally that 
the regrets become aggravated into reproaches, — 
rarely from the side which receives the new accessions, 
less rarely from the one which is left. It is quite con- 
ceivable that the Roman Church, which considers it- 
self the only true one, should look on those who leave 
its communion as guilty of a great offence. It is 
equally natural that a church which considers Pope 
and Pagan a pair of murderous giants, sitting at the 
mouths of their caves, alike in their hatred to true 
Christians, should regard any of its members who go 
over to Romanism as lost in fatal error. But within 
the Protestant fold there are many compartments, and 
it would seem that it is not a deadly defection to pass 
from one to another. 

So far from such exchanges between sects being 
wrong, they ought to happen a great deal oftener than 
they do. All the larger bodies of Christians should be 
constantly exchanging members. All men are born 
with conservative or aggressive tendencies : they be- 
long naturally with the idol-worshippers or the idol- 
breakers. Some wear their fathers' old clothes, and 
some will have a new suit. One class of men must 
have their faith hammered in like a nail, by author- 
ity ; another class must have it worked in like a screw, 
by argument. Members of one of these classes often 
find themselves fixed by circumstances in the other. 
The late Orestes A. Brownson used to preach at one 
time to a little handful of persons, in a small upper 
room, where some of them got from him their first 
lesson about the substitution of reverence for idolatry, 
in dealing with the books they hold sacred. But after 



420 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

a time Mr. Brownson found he had mistaken his 
church, and went over to the Roman Catholic estab- 
lishment, of which he became and remained to his dy- 
ing day one of the most stalwart champions. Nature 
is prolific and ambidextrous. While this strong con- 
vert was trjdng to carry us back to the ancient faith, 
another of her sturdy children, Theodore Parker, was 
trying just as hard to provide a new church for the 
future. One was driving the sheep into the ancient 
fold, while the other was taking down the bars that 
kept them out of the new pasture. Neither of these 
powerful men could do the other's work, and each had 
to find the task for which he was destined. 

The " old gospel ship," as the Methodist song calls 
it, carries many who would steer by the wake of their 
vessel. But there are many others who do not trouble 
themselves to look over the stern, having their eyes 
fixed on the light-house in the distance before them. 
In less figurative language, there are multitudes of 
persons who are perfectly contented with the old for- 
mulae of the church with which they and their fathers 
before them have been and are connected, for the 
simple reason that they fit, like old shoes, because 
they have been worn so long, and mingled with these, 
in the most conservative religious body, are here and 
there those who are restless in the fetters of a confes- 
sion of faith to which they have pledged themselves 
without believing in it. This has been true of the 
Athanasian creed, in the Anglican Church, for two 
centuries more or less, unless the Archbishop of Can- 
terbury, Tillotson, stood alone in wishing the church 
were well rid of it. In fact, it has happened to the 
present writer to hear the Thirty-nine Articles sum« 
marily disposed of by one of the most zealous members 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 421 

of the American branch of that communion, in a verb 
of one syllable, more familiar to the ears of the fore- 
castle than to those of the vestry. 

But on the other hand, it is far from uncommon to 
meet with persons among the so-called " liberal " de- 
nominations who are uneasy for want of a more definite 
ritual and a more formal organization than they find 
in their own body. Now, the rector or the minister 
must be well aware that there are such cases, and each 
of them must be aware that there are individuals un- 
der his guidance whom he cannot satisfy by argument, 
and who really belong by all their instincts to another 
communion. It seems as if a thoroughly honest, 
straight-collared clergyman would say frankly to his 
restless parishioner : " You do not believe the central 
doctrines of the church which you are in the habit of 
attending. You belong properly to Brother A.'s or 
Brother B.'s fold, and it will be more manly and prob- 
ably more profitable for you to go there than to stay 
with us." And, again, the rolling-collared clergyman 
might be expected to say to this or that uneasy lis- 
tener : " You are longing for a church which will 
settle your beliefs for you, and relieve you to a great 
extent from the task, to which you seem to be unequal, 
of working out your own salvation with fear and 
trembling. Go over the way to Brother C. 's or Brother 
D.'s ; your spine is weak, and they will furnish you a 
back-board which will keep you straight and make you 
comfortable." Patients are not the property of their 
physicians, nor parishioners of their ministers. 

As for the children of clergymen, the presumption 
is that they will adhere to the general belief professed 
by their fathers. But they do not lose their birth- 
right or their individuality, and have the world all 



422 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

before them to choose their creed from, like other per- 
sons. They are sometimes called to account for at- 
tacking the dogmas they are supposed to have heard 
preached from their childhood. They cannot defend 
themselves, for various good reasons. If they did, 
one would have to say he got more preaching than 
was good for him, and came at last to feel about ser- 
mons and their doctrines as confectioners' children do 
about candy. Another would have to own that he got 
his religious belief, not from his father, but from his 
mother. That would account for a great deal, for the 
milk in a woman's veins sweetens, or at least, dilutes 
an acrid doctrine, as the blood of the motherly cow 
softens the virulence of small-pox, so that its mark 
survives only as the seal of immunity. Another would 
plead atavism, and say he got his religious instincts 
from his great-grandfather, as some do their complex- 
ion or their temper. Others would be compelled to 
confess that the belief of a wife or a sister had dis- 
placed that which they naturally inherited. No man 
can be expected to go thus into the details of his fam- 
ily history, and, therefore, it is an ill-bred and inde- 
cent thing to fling a man's father's creed in his face, 
as if he had broken the fifth commandment in think- 
ing for himself in the light of a new generation. Com- 
mon delicacy would prevent him from saying that he 
did not get his faith from his father, but from some- 
body else, perhaps from his grandmother Lois and his 
mother Eunice, like the young man whom the Apostle 
cautioned against total abstinence. 

It is always the right, and may sometimes be the 
duty, of the layman to call the attention of the clergy 
to the short-comings and errors, not only of their own 
time, but also of the preceding generations, of which 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 423 

they are the intellectual and moral product. This is 
especially true when the authority of great names is 
fallen back upon as a defence of opinions not in them- 
selves deserving to be upheld. It may be very impor- 
tant to show that the champions of this or that set of 
dogmas, some of which are extinct or obsolete as be- 
liefs, while others retain their vitality, held certain 
general notions which vitiated their conclusions. And 
in proportion to the eminence of such champions, and 
the frequency with which their names are appealed to 
as a bulwark of any particular creed or set of doc- 
trines, is it urgent to show into what obliquities or 
extravagances or contradictions of thought they have 
been betrayed. 

In summing up the religious history of New Eng- 
land, it would be just and proper to show the agency 
of the Mathers, father and son, in the witchcraft delu- 
sion. It would be quite fair to plead in their behalf 
the common beliefs of their time. It would be an 
extenuation of their acts that, not many years before, 
the great and good magistrate. Sir Matthew Hale, had 
sanctioned the conviction of prisoners accused of witch- 
craft. To fall back on the errors of the time is very 
proper when we are trying our predecessors in foro 
conscientim. The houses they dwelt in may have had 
some weak or decayed beams and rafters, but they 
served for their shelter, at any rate. It is quite an- 
other matter when those rotten timbers are used in 
holding up the roofs over our own heads. Still more, 
if one of our ancestors built on an unsafe or an un- 
wholesome foundation, the best thing we can do is to 
leave it and persuade others to leave it if we can. 
And if we refer to him as a precedent, it must be as a 
warning and not as a giiide. 



424 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

Such was the reason of the present writer's taking 
up the writings of Jonathan Edwards for examination 
in a recent essay. The " Edwardsian " theology is 
still recognized as a power in and beyond the denomi- 
nation to which he belonged. One or more churches 
bear his name, and it is thrown into the scale of theo- 
logical belief as if it added great strength to the party 
which claims him. That he was a man of extraordi- 
nary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not 
questioned, nor that he was a most acute reasoner, who 
could unfold a proposition into its consequences as 
patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts 
its confession from a fossil fragment. But it was 
maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were 
mixed up with his conceptions of man, and so many 
diabolizing attributes embodied in his imagination of 
the Deity, that his system of beliefs was tainted through- 
out by them, and that the fact of his being so remark- 
able a logician recoiled on the premises which pointed 
his inexorable syllogisms to such revolting conclusions. 
When he presents us a God, in whose sight children, 
with certain not too frequent exceptions, " are young 
vipers, and are infinitely more hateful than vipers ; " 
when he gives the most frightful detailed description 
of infinite and endless tortures which it drives men 
and women mad to think of prepared for " the bulk 
of mankind;" when he cruelly pictures a futm^e in 
which parents are to sing hallelujahs of praise as they 
see their children driven into the furnace, where they 
are to lie " roasting " forever, — we have a right to 
say that the man who held such beliefs and indulged 
in such imaginations and expressions is a burden and 
not a support in reference to the creed with which his 
name is associated. What heathenism has ever ap- 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 425 

proached the horrors of this conception of human des- 
tiny? It is not an abuse of language to apply to such 
a system of beliefs the name of Christian pessimism. 

If these and similar doctrines are so generally 
discredited as some appear to think, we might ex- 
pect to see the change showing itself in catechisms and 
confessions of faith, to hear the joyful news of relief 
from its horrors in all our churches, and no longer to 
read in the newspapers of ministers rejected or put on 
trial for heresy because they could not accept the most 
dreadful of these doctrines. Whether this be so or 
not, it must be owned that the name of Jonathan Ed- 
wards does at this day carry a certain authority with 
it for many persons, so that anything he believed gains 
for them some degree of probability from that circum- 
stance. It would, therefore, be of much interest to 
know whether he was trustworthy in his theological 
speculations, and whether he ever changed his belief 
with reference to any of the great questions above al- 
luded to. 

Some of our readers may remember a story which 
got abroad many years ago that a certain M. Babinet, 
a scientific Frenchman of note, had predicted a serious 
accident soon to occur to the planet on which we live 
by the collision with it of a great comet then approach- 
ing us, or some such occurrence. There is no doubt 
that this prediction produced anxiety and alarm in 
many timid persons. It became a very interesting 
question with them who this M. Babinet might be. 
Was he a sound observer, who had made other ob- 
servations and predictions which had proved accurate ? 
Or was he one of those men who are always making 
blunders for other people to correct ? Is he known to 
have changed his opinion as to the approaching dis- 
astrous event ? 



426 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

So long as there were any persons made anxious by 
this prediction, so long as there was even one who be- 
lieved that he, and his family, and his nation, and his 
race, and the home of mankind, with all its monu- 
ments, were very soon to be smitten in mid-heaven and 
instantly shivered into fragments, it was very desir- 
able to find any evidence that this prophet of evil was 
a man who held many extravagant and even monstrous 
opinions. Still more satisfactory would it be if it 
could be shown that he had reconsidered his predic- 
tions, and declared that he could not abide by his for- 
mer alarming conclusions. And we should think very 
ill of any astronomer who would not rejoice for the 
sake of his fellow-creatures, if not for his own, to find 
the threatening presage invalidated in either or both 
of the ways just mentioned, even though he had com- 
mitted himself to M. Babinet's dire belief. 

But what is the trivial, temporal accident of the wip- 
ing out of a planet and its inhabitants to the infinite 
catastrophe which shall establish a mighty world of 
eternal despair ? And which is it most desirable for 
mankind to have disproved or weakened, the grounds 
of the threat of M. Babinet, or those of the other in- 
finitely more terrible comminations, so far as they rest 
on the authority of Jonathan Edwards ? 

The writer of this paper had been long engaged in 
the study of the writings of Edwards, with reference 
to the essay he had in contemplation, when, on speak- 
ing of the subject to a very disttuguished orthodox 
divine, this gentleman mentioned the existence of a 
manuscript of Edwards which had been held back 
from the public on account of some opinions or ten- 
dencies it contained, or was suspected of containing. 
"High Arianism" was the exact expression he used 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 427 

with reference to it. On relating this fact to an illus- 
trious man of science, whose name is best known to 
botanists, but is justly held in great honor by the ortho- 
dox body to which he belongs, it appeared that he, too, 
had heard of such a manuscript, and the questionable 
doctrine associated with it in his memory was Sabel- 
lianism. It was of course proper in the writer of an 
essay on Jonathan Edwards to mention the alleged 
existence of such a manuscript, with reference to which 
the same caution seemed to have been exercised as that 
which led the editor of his collected works to suppress 
the language Edwards had used about children. 

This mention led to a friendly correspondence be- 
tween the writer and one of the professors in the the- 
ological school at Andover, and finally to the publica- 
tion of a brief essay, which, for some reason, had 
been withheld from publication for more than a cen- 
tury. Its title is " Observations concerning the Scrip- 
ture (Economy of the Trinity and Covenant of Redemp- 
tion. By Jonathan Edwards." It contains thirty-six 
pages and a haK, each small page having about two 
hundred words. The pages before the reader will be 
found to average about three hundred and twenty-five 
words. An introduction and an appendix by the ed- 
itor. Professor Egbert C. Smyth, swell the contents to 
nearly a hundred pages, but these additions, and the 
circumstance that it is bound in boards, must not lead 
us to overlook the fact that the little volume is noth- 
ing more than a pamphlet in book's clothing. 

A most extraordinary performance it certainly is, 
dealing with the arrangements entered into by the 
three persons of the Trinity, in as bald and matter-of- 
fact language and as commercial a spirit as if the 
author had been handling the adjustment of a limited 



428 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

partnership between three retail tradesmen. But, lest 
a layman's judgment might be considered insufficient, 
the treatise was submitted by the writer to one of the 
most learned of our theological experts, — the same 
who once informed a church dignitary, who had been 
attempting to define his theological position, that he 
was a Eutychian, — a fact which he seems to have 
been no more aware of than M. Jourdain was con- 
scious that he had been speaking prose all his life. 
The treatise appeared to this professor anti-trinitarian, 
not in the direction of Unitarianism, however, but of 
Tritheism. Its anthropomorphism affected him like 
blasphemy, and the paper produced in him the sense 
of "great disgust," which its whole character might 
well excite in the unlearned reader. 

All this is, however, of little importance, for this is 
not the work of Edwards referred to by the present 
writer in his previous essay. The tract recently printed 
as a volume may be the one referred to by Dr. Bush- 
nell, in 1851, but of this reference by him the writer 
never heard until after his own essay was already 
printed. The manuscript of the " Observations " was 
received by Professor Smyth, as he tells us in his in- 
troduction, about fifteen years ago, from the late Rev- 
erend William T. D wight, D. D., to whom it was be- 
queathed by his brother, the Reverend Dr. Sereno E. 
Pwight. 

But the reference of the present writer was to an- 
other production of the great logician, thus spoken of 
in a quotation from " the accomplished editor of the 
Hartford ' Courant,' " to be found in Professor Smyth's 
introduction : — 

" It has long been a matter of private information that Pro- 
fessor Edwards A. Park, of Andover, had in his possession an un- 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 429 

published manuscript of Edwards of considerable extent, perbaps 
two thirds as long as his treatise on the will. . As few have ever 
seen the manuscript, its contents are only known by vague re- 
ports. ... It is said that it contains a departure from his pub- 
lished views on the Trinity and a modification of the view of orig- 
inal sin. One account of it says that the manuscript leans toward 
Sabellianism, and that it even approaches Pelagianism." 

It was to this " suppressed " manuscript the present 
writer referred, and not to the slender brochure re- 
cently given to the public. He is bound, therefore, to 
say plainly that to satisfy inquirers who may be still 
in doubt with reference to Edwards's theological 
views, it would be necessary to submit this manuscript, 
and all manuscripts of his which have been kept pri- 
vate, to their inspection, in print, if possible, so that 
all could form their own opinion about it or them. 

The whole matter may be briefly stated thus : Ed- 
wards believed in an eternity of unimaginable horrors 
for " the bulk of mankind." His authority counts 
with many in favor of that belief, which affects great 
numbers as the idea of ghosts affected Madame de 
Stael : "e/e ri'ycroispas^Tnaisjeles crains.^^ This 
belief is one which it is infinitely desirable to the hu- 
man race should be shown to be possibly, probably, or 
certainly erroneous. It is, therefore, desirable in the 
interest of humanity that any force the argument in 
its favor may derive from Edwards's authority should 
be weakened by showing that he was capable of writ- 
ing most unwisely, and if it should be proved that he 
changed his opinions, or ran into any " heretical " 
vagaries, by using these facts against the validity of 
his judgment. That he was capable of writing most 
unwisely has been sufficiently shown by the recent 
publication of his " Observations.^' Whether he any- 



430 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

where aontradicted "vsfhat were generally accepted as 
his theological opinions, or how far he may have lapsed 
into heresies, the public will never rest satisfied until 
it sees and interprets for itseK everything that is open 
to question which may be contained in his yet unpub^ 
lished manuscripts. All this is not in the least a per- 
sonal affair with the writer, who, in the course of his 
studies of Edwards's works, accidentally heard, from 
the unimpeachable sources sufficiently indicated, the 
reports, which it seems must have been familiar to 
many, that there was unpublished matter bearing on 
the opinions of the author through whose voluminous 
works he had been toiling. And if he rejoiced even 
to hope that so wise a man as Edwards has been con- 
sidered, so good a man as he is recognized to have 
been, had, possibly in his changes of opinion, ceased 
to think of children as vipers, and of parents as shout- 
ing hallelujahs while their lost darlings were being 
driven into the flames, where is the theologian who 
would not rejoice to hope so with him or who would be 
willing to tell his wife or his daughter that he did 
not? 

The real, vital division of the religious part of our 
Protestant communities is into Christian optimists and 
Christian pessimists. The Christian optimist in his 
fullest development is characterized by a cheerful coun- 
tenance, a voice in the major key, an undisguised en- 
joyment of earthly comforts, and a short confession of 
faith. His theory of the universe is progress; his 
idea of God is that he is a Father with all the true 
paternal attributes, of man that he is destined to come 
into harmony with the key-note of divine order, of this 
earth that it is a training-school for a better sphere of 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 431 

existence. Tlie Christian pessimist in his most typi- 
cal manifestation is apt to wear a solemn aspect, to 
speak, especially from the pulpit, in the minor key, to 
undervalue the lesser enjoyments of life, to insist on a 
more extended list of articles of belief. His theory of 
the universe recognizes this corner of it as a moral 
ruin ; his idea of the Creator is that of a ruler whose 
pardoning power is subject to the veto of what is called 
" justice ; " his notion of man is that he is born a nat- 
ural hater of God and goodness, and that his natural 
destiny is eternal misery. The line dividing these two 
great classes zigzags its way through the religious com- 
munity, sometimes following denominational layers and 
cleavages, sometimes going, like a geological fracture, 
through many different strata. The natural antago- 
nists of the religious pessimists are the men of science, 
especially the evolutionists, and the poets. It was but 
a conditioned prophecy, yet we cannot doubt what was 
in Milton's mind when he sang, in one of the divinest 
of his strains, that 

" Hell itself will pass away, 
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day." 

And Nature, always fair if we will allow her time 
enough, after giving mankind the inspired tinker who 
painted the Christian's life as that of a hunted animal, 
" never long at ease," desponding, despairing, on the 
verge of self-murder, — painted it with an originality, 
a vividness, a power and a sweetness, too, that rank 
him with the great authors of all time, — kind Nature, 
after this gift, sent as his counterpoise the inspired 
ploughman, whose songs have done more to humanize 
the hard theology of Scotland than all the rationalistic 
sermons that were ever preached. Our own Whittier 
has done and is doing the same thing, in a far holier 



432 PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. 

spirit than Burns, for the inherited beliefs of New 
England and the country to which New England be- 
longs. Let me sweeten these closing paragraphs of 
an essay not meaning to hold a word of bitterness with 
a passage or two from the lay-preacher who is listened 
to by a larger congregation than any man who speaks 
from the pulpit. Who will not hear his words with 
comfort and rejoicing when he speaks of " that larger 
hope which, secretly cherished from the times of Ori- 
gen and Duns Scotus to those of Foster and Maurice, 
has found its fitting utterance in the noblest poem of 
the age ? " 

It is Tennyson's " In Memoriam " to which he re- 
fers, and from which he quotes four verses, of which 
this is the last : 

" Behold ! we know not anything : 
I can but trust that good shall fall 
At last, — far off, — at last, to all, 
And every winter change to spring." 

If some are disposed to think that the progress of 
civilization and the rapidly growing change of opinion 
renders unnecessary any further effort to humanize 
" the Gospel of dread tidings ; " if any believe the 
doctrines of the Longer and Shorter Catechism of the 
Westminster divines are so far obsolete as to require 
no further handling ; if there are any who think these 
subjects have lost their interest for living souls ever 
since they themselves have learned to stay at home on 
Sundays, with their cakes and ale instead of going to 
meeting, — not such is Mr. Whittier's opinion, as we 
may infer from his recent beautiful poem, " The Min- 
ister's Daughter." It is not science alone that the 
old Christian pessimism has got to struggle with, but 
the instincts of childhood, the affections of maternity, 



THE PULPIT AND THE PEW. 433 

the intuitions of poets, the contagious humanity of the 
philanthropist, — in short, human nature and the ad- 
vance of civilization. The pulpit has long helped the 
world, and is still one of the chief defences against the 
dangers that threaten society, and it is worthy now, as 
it always has been in its best representation, of all 
love and honor. But many of its professed creeds 
imperatively demand revision, and the pews which call 
for it must be listened to, or the preacher will by and 
by find himself speaking to a congregation of bodiless 
echoes. 



